Bieke Depoorter

Born in Belgium in 1986, Bieke Depoorter received a master’s degree in photography from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2009. Three years later, at 25 years old, she was made a nominee of Magnum Photos. She was named a full member in 2016.

Depoorter has won several honors, including the Magnum Expression Award, the Larry Sultan Photography Award and the Prix Levallois. In 2023, she was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. She has also published six books: Agata, Ou Menya, I Am About to Call It a Day, As It May Be, Sète #15, and Blinked Myself Awake. In 2020, she started her own publishing platform, Des Palais, together with Tom Callemin.

The relationships Depoorter establishes with the subjects of her photographs lie at the foundation of her artistic practice. Accidental encounters are the starting point. How these interactions naturally develop dictates what follows. Several projects have been the result of Depoorter’s constant questioning of the medium itself.

In As It May Be, Depoorter gradually became more aware of her status as an outsider, both culturally and as a photographer. So, in 2017, she revisited Egypt with the first draft of the book, inviting people to write comments directly onto the photographs. In Sète #15, and Dvalemodus, a short film she co-directed, she began to see her subjects as actors. Although she portrayed them in their true environments, she tried to project her own story onto the scenes, fictionalizing the realities of her subjects in a way that blurred the lines between their world and hers. In Agata, she explored the complexities of the photographic enterprise, grappling with the relationship between photographer, subject, audience, and the medium itself. By diving deep into a collaborative working dynamic with a Polish woman, Agata Kay, whom she met in a strip club in Paris, Depoorter created a small alternate universe that served as a container for them to explore questions they each had regarding identity, performance, and representation.

In her ongoing project Michael, Depoorter investigates the life and disappearance of a man she met on the streets of Portland in 2015. After giving her three suitcases full of scrapbooks, notes and books, he dropped out of sight.