Bildersturm

Wuhan Radiography is a surprising series of black and white analog images taken by Belgian photographer Simon Vansteenwinckel. The first pages cast some doubt… The book’s images seem real, yet ghostly. They are beautiful, too exposed, sometimes irradiated. It seems that he used a particular film. A filter or an ultrasensitive film ?

Scenes of life, places and urban characters look mysterious, as if captured between two universes, frozen between day and night. Here and there, a luminous halo hovers above the city, like an observing star.

Through his enigmatic modus operandi, the photographer creates a disturbing dismantling of our preconceptions. We no longer know where we are. The city is indeed Wuhan, now famous worldwide. But was it before or after the pandemic? When did the photographer get lost? Has he ever been there? Publisher’s Info

Born in 1978 in Brussels, Simon Vansteenwinckel is a photographer and graphic designer. He carries out long-term documentary projects, making the aesthetic choice of the contrasting and grainy rendering of black and white analog film to focus on the image, the natural lights, and the composition so as to underline the timeless aspect.

His subjects are diverse, ranging from an initiatory journey with his family to Chile and Argentina which gave birth to the book Nosotros (Editions Yellow Now, 2018) to Platteland (Editions Home Frit’ Home, 2019), a visual narrative of his wanderings in Belgium. He is also the co-author of the books 1010 South Station (Editions Le Mulet, 2018), Sauvage (Editions Le Mulet, 2018), and 1010 Noordzee (Le Mulet editions, 2019).