Details

Description

Kingman Haunted #52, 2007
[From the series Schoffie]

Published in her book The Eyes of the Fox, 2018

Digital color print based on original Polaroid
on beautiful PHOTO RAG ULTRA SMOOTH
305gsm - 100% cotton by HAHNEMÜHLE - not mounted


Carmen De Vos - Artist statement

Flying Freelance Portrayer. Purveyor of Exquisite Photographic Peculiarities. Chroniqueur and Archiver. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the late TicKL-Magazine. 

The Belgian artist Carmen De Vos is a slow photographer. She registers, portrays and thinks up odd stories. She shoots Polaroids to frame these mental escapades, they get so easily out of hand. 

She enormously longs for what she’s afraid to loose: real human contact, the slowness of being and creating, the tangibility of materials. Almost without exception she uses old Polaroid camera’s, long time expired film and self-made filters. Her tools and methods - such as film bleaching and deliberate film obstruction - are not precise and are not even geared towards a perfect representation. They often yield results - such as colorisation, deformation, unsharpness - which she could never have predicted on forehand with any certainty, because their flaws do not allow for calculation. She’s not in control. She fights the material. She plans, stages and directs but the decayed chemistry and off-focus lenses add their magic. All by themselves. Which merrily surprises her. Or ruins her image. This battle attracts her as much as it frustrates her. She loves to create within these limitations, to try to produce the best possible image within the narrow circumstances given. Luckily, she’s a sucker for imperfections.

Once upon a time she found herself guilty of home-crafted mischiefs for TicKL, her English art porn Polaroid magazine. She never really got cured from naughtiness. She can’t help but traveling back to these blessed times of free-love photography with her Polaroids.