First name: Carl
Preposition: De
Surname: Keyzer
Country of origin: Belgium
Subtheme: Terrorism, Conflict, Politics, Order and chaos, Society, On the run, Culture, Religion
Carl De Keyzer (Belgium, 1958), studied photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. He subsequently founded Ghent’s xyz Gallery together with colleague photographer Dirk Braeckman. He is a member of the highly-regarded Magnum Photos photographers’ collective. De Keyzer has been awarded several international prizes, including the Eugene Smith Award (usa, 1990), the Kodak Book Award (Germany, 1996) and the Fujifilm Press Award (Belgium, 2002).
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Congo – and using a guidebook from 1950 – De Keyzer set off on a search for the relics of that country’s colonial period. The resulting exhibition Congo (belge) (2010) was a great success.
In Moments Before the Flood (2008-2013) De Keyzer is examining the ways in which Europe is dealing with rising sea levels. He will be travelling the whole of Europe’s coast to photograph its landscapes and its seascapes. That eroding coast is, after all, the place where dangers to the interior first become manifest. De Keyzer’s photos radiate a sense of apprehension: disaster may well be imminent.
In Trinity (2008) De Keyzer focuses on the globalisation of power and violence. The title is a reference to the traditional portrayal of the Supreme Power in the art of classical painters such as Masaccio and Van Eyck, and is also to the codename of the project that developed the first atomic bomb. De Keyzer documents present day power in three probing chapters: Tableaux de guerre, Tableaux d’histoire and Tableaux politiques.
