"Eyes Wide Open" on a trembling photography (Brussels, Apr 2018)

Eyes Wild Open highlights the relationships that exist between several generations of photographers whose practice is as intuitive as it is abrupt or transgressive.

Initiated after the second world war by pioneers such as

Robert Frank, William Klein or the founders of the legendary Japanese magazine Provoke, this singular approach to photography has stood the test of time, and its heritage remains particularly productive in contemporary creation.

For the first time in the world, in the prestigious art center of the Museum of Botanique, Eyes Wild Open photography exhibition will make 70 years of photography converse in a unique scenography, mixing rare vintages, new works, projections, texts and rare books of almost 30 photographers from 17 nationalities, including:

• Robert Frank • Ed van der Elsken • William Klein • Daido Moriyama • Takuma Nakahira • Ishiuchi Miyako • Christer Strömholm • Anders Petersen • Dolorès Marat • Paulo Nozolino • Antoine d’Agata • Klavdij Sluban • Michael Ackerman • Jehsong Baak • JH Engström • Olivier Pin-Fat • Tiane Doan Na Champassak • Lorenzo Castore • Arja Hyytiäinen • Jacob Aue Sobol • Alisa Resnik • Gilles Roudière • Stéphane Charpentier • Gabrielle Duplantier • Yusuf Sevinçli • Sohrab Hura • Sébastien Van Malleghem

“Among them some are trying to revive and revitalize the documentary genre while others are exploring new introspective or poetic paths. Tracing a path through the work of each of them, a theme emerges: none of them is playing the adaptation or imitation game. No posturing, no fakery, no counterfeiters. Though they may often have drawn nourishment from the work of their predecessors, and there are links and correspondences that float clearly beneath the surface, they have no shackles and subscribe only to the school of untamed and untamable photography.

All these photographers have their eyes wild open. Their work is powerful, rich and diverse.

William Klein

"Vali Myers in Saint-Germain-des-Prés" (Rêve) (the “enfant terrible” of Dutch photography)

- Ed van de Elsken

“I rarely intend to be directly political in my work. However, I believe that art – at its best – cannot avoid being political. Aesthetics are political. Any work of art, once displayed in public, is a statement from the artist. So in one way or another, every artwork is directly or indirectly political, good or bad”.

- Yusuf Sevinçli

William Klein - Jacob Aue Sobol

They are not stood before the world, they are in the world. They are not keeping a respectful distance, not bending to rules nor fashions. They are casting aside the conventions with images that rewrite their own subjective forms of expression. Their connection with reality and with the shot is physical, rough, immediate. Their moving, incandescent, nervous images are like stigmata: they bear witness to nothing other than their contiguity with a world that is sometimes overflowing. They ask more questions than they answer. Niggling and furtive, they evoke rather than describing, and reduce down to a perceptive intensity of pulsing ebbs and flows, convulsive, fragmented or fractional visions, and their emotional charge lies in that very tension. For it is the permeability of these photographers to the world that renders their images permeable to their viewers.

Eyes Wild Open brings together those who, in subverting photography, manage to pierce us with their contagious images.”

Caroline Bénichou.

“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”

“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.”

“The race to make more money to keep up with the rich, he says, is the reason Americans are spending less time with children and less time sleeping. It's also the reason Americans feel less happy, since happiness is partly determined by how well we're doing compared with those around us. The race, he said, will only get more destructive as the rich get richer and more numerous.”

- Robert Frank

"Everything is an excuse for a potential photo"

- Dolorès Marat

«I LIKE WHEN PEOPLE SEE IN MY WORKS SOMETHING I DON’T»

- Michael Ackerman

- Michael Ackerman

"Nordic Noir" - Sebastien Van Malleghem

Gabrielle Duplantier

"Besides the aesthetic, the invading blacks are, for me, a way to get rid of anecdotal details, simplify and avoid too much narrative in the pictures".

- Gilles Roudières

“However, I could also often feel the distance between us, and so I often found myself in the role of the spectator photographing the constantly changing scenarios in the city. Underlined by the difference in language, race, and social status, it was a continuous struggle to create an equal meeting, but when this succeeded it was often in this encounter on a one to one basis that I got the feeling of the closeness and intimacy I was searching for.”

- Jacob Aue Sobol