By Emanuela Mazzonis
Across the selection of artists presented in Focus Photo, a distinct tendency emerges: the use of photography to explore a contemporary aesthetic condition shaped by poetic and dreamlike perspectives, as well as by a search for forms of temporality that resist the frenetic pace of contemporary life.
The work of French-Israeli artist Lior Gal (HANGAR, Brussels) invites the viewer’s gaze to slow down, reflecting on the memory of places, displacement, and the relationship between the visible and the invisible. During his long walks, Gal photographs fragments and traces encountered along the way, later combining images from different places and moments to create layered spaces in which multiple temporalities overlap. The delicate images of Sophie Zénon (Lee Bauwens Gallery, Brussels), evoking miniature landscapes and fragile still-life, similarly engage with the memory of distant places. Her work examines the relationships between territory, nature, remembrance, and the construction of the self. The artistic duo Albarrán Cabrera (Les Douches la Galerie, Paris), who have worked together since 1996, use photography as a means of investigating time, perception, memory, and the nature of reality. Their landscapes, birds, trees, figures, and fragments do not simply document the visible world; rather, they are transformed into contemplative experiences. Strongly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, their metaphysical visual language guides the imagination towards philosophical questions concerning perception and the meaning of reality.
Through a very different approach, the artist SMITH (Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Brussels) explores the tensions between the fictional and the imaginary, the visible and the invisible, the terrestrial and the celestial, and the human and the non-human. Working across photography, film, installation, and performance, and collaborating with writers, scientists, engineers, philosophers, and composers, SMITH investigates the mysteries and complexities of human identity.
The search for the invisible—or, more precisely, the “unseeable”—is also central to the practice of Jean Godecharle (Hilde Vandaele Gallery, Watou, Kortrijk). Moving between indistinct landscapes and precise fragments of reality, he engages directly with his surrounding environment. Collecting natural elements and bringing them back to his studio, Godecharle observes and experiments with them through light, allowing new forms of life and meaning to emerge through the manipulation of the photographic image. Antoine De Winter (HANGAR, Brussels) likewise approaches photography as a territory of appearance, where the image becomes a site of encounter between matter, landscape, and memory. Incorporating elements physically collected from the territories he investigates into the development of his images, he allows the photographed place to become materially embedded within the photograph itself—an approach he describes as “geological photography.” The relationship between human beings and the landscape is explored by another artist presented by HANGAR, Matthieu Litt. Through his distinctive use of blur, Litt investigates the fractured relationship between humanity and the environment, reflecting on the fragility of our ecosystem. His work seeks a poetic perspective, favoring an aesthetic and sensory experience over the straightforward representation of tangible reality.
Swedish photographer Helene Schmitz (Maria Lund, Paris) also investigates the ambivalent relationship between humankind and nature. Her carefully composed color photographs examine the ways in which humans seek to control, transform, and dominate the natural world. Challenging romantic conceptions of nature, her work reveals how beauty can coexist with danger, instability, and the growing urgency of the climate crisis. Over the course of five decades, Andy Goldsworthy (Galerie Lelong, Paris, New York) has developed a practice spanning sculpture, installation, photography, and film, investigating the relationships between landscape, humanity, natural materials, and the passage of time. His poetic form of Land Art understands the artwork as part of a continuous cycle of growth, transformation, decay, and renewal.
Photography plays an essential role in documenting these often transient works and in recording his direct engagement with the natural environment. The observation of everyday life, ordinary landscapes, and natural elements is equally central to the work of Letizia Romanini (Reuter Bausch Art Gallery, Luxembourg). Through seriality, repetition, and accumulation, she draws attention to urgent concerns, including the fragility of our ecosystem. Her delicate images create moments of suspended time, guiding the viewer’s gaze towards intangible plays of form, light, and shadow.
The prints of Jacky Lecouturier (Quai 4, Liège) similarly invite a form of contemplation that avoids both the idealization of nature and escapism from the present. His photographs capture those moments in which a natural landscape activates memory, emotion, and personal imagination, allowing the experience of a place to resonate beyond its immediate appearance. Our perception of the photographic image is also constantly challenged in the work of Stéphane Couturier (Les Douches la Galerie, Paris), whose practice questions photography’s supposedly objective nature. The image is never neutral: it is layered, transformed, recomposed, and fragmented, often moving towards abstraction. His vision of buildings, factories, and cities reflects a world in constant metamorphosis, in which nothing remains fixed and everything is shaped by the continuous flux of time and space.
The work of Aurélie Pétrel (Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, Paris, Geneva, New York, Lyon, Panéry, Whandaff, Tokyo) similarly raises questions about the mutability of the image and the multiplicity of its perception. For Pétrel, every image generates multiple points of view, allowing time and space to overlap and disrupting the stability of our perception. In a contemporary visual environment saturated with photographs, her work becomes an exercise in learning to distinguish between fiction and reality and in recalibrating the ways in which we see. Questioning what we are looking at is a fil rouge connecting many of the artists presented in Focus Photo.
This is particularly evident in the work of Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz (VF Art Projects, Luxembourg / Abre, Córdoba). Her large-format compositions often isolate details of the human body—a curve, a gesture, a fragment of skin—transforming the figure into an almost abstract visual form. She uses the body as a universal language through which to explore identity, dignity, cultural diversity, injustice, ritual, and the complexity of human existence. The long-term projects of South African artist Lee-Ann Olwage (The Bridge Gallery, Paris) also address social inequality, marginalized communities, identity, gender, education, and discrimination. Rather than simply documenting her subjects, Olwage involves them in the construction of the image, establishing an intimate and collaborative relationship intended to affirm their dignity, agency, and resilience.
Finally, several artists experiment with photographic techniques as a means of questioning the very nature and value of the image itself. Marta Djourina (LAGE EGAL Curatorial Projects, Berlin, Brussels) explores the essence of light by working directly with photosensitive paper. Through performative gestures that evoke painting, she focuses on the physicality of traces of light and on the visualization of geometric forms. Sylvie Bonnot (HANGAR, Brussels) likewise employs a performative approach, “moulting” the negative through incisions, peeling, and the detachment of the silver gelatin layer, which she subsequently transfers onto other supports such as fabric, objects, or walls. Through this process, she is both literally and metaphorically seeking to reveal, through photography, the skin of the world. Lucas Leffler (Lee Bauwens Gallery, Brussels) moves beyond the conventional photographic print to investigate the intersections of technology, industry, landscape, and natural processes. In one of his projects, he uses mud collected from a stream contaminated by waste from the photographic industry to create his own photosensitive emulsion. His approach gives photography a powerful material presence, turning the photographic process itself into both subject and medium.
Through these diverse practices, Focus Photo proposes photography not as a fixed or homogeneous field, but as an expanded territory: a medium capable of recording, transforming, questioning, and reinventing reality. From intimate contemplation to environmental concern, from the instability of perception to the physical transformation of the photographic surface, the works brought together in this section invite us to slow down and reconsider not only what we see, but also how, and why, we look.
Discover more photo-focused programmes at the fair, including FotoClierf, based in Clervaux, presenting works by Alma Haser, Filip Markiewicz, Colin Delfosse, Anne Speltz, Lisa Kohl, Elodie Grethen, Marc Schroeder, and Hannah Dara, alongside Echo119 from Paris, showcasing Rinko Kawauchi, Laure Winants, and Manon Lanjouère, with a variety of 100% photo-based pieces on display.