Dirk Braeckman

From Aspiring Painter to Camera: The Darkroom Experience of 1977

Braeckman entered the photography and film department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 1977. He has said that he was advised to study photography as preparation for becoming a painter; after taking up a camera he had never used before, he continued photographing^*5. During his first year, he watched an image emerge chemically from exposed paper. The “magic” of this process became decisive in making photography his principal medium^*18. The camera could receive traces of interiors, fabric, bodies, and walls encountered while traveling, while the darkroom allowed him to work upon a single surface over time. The combination of these two temporal stages suited the way he wanted to make images.

Black-and-White Photography and the Darkroom: Continuing to Judge the Image as It Develops

Braeckman chose black-and-white photography because it allowed him to watch the image and intervene while it developed. In his early color work, it was difficult to assess changes in color inside the darkroom while adjusting chemistry and exposure. He has explained that black and white let him respond directly to test strips, dodging, burning, and changes in the chemicals^*5. S.M.A.K. presents his work as an inquiry into photographic reproducibility and the idea of the photograph as a “window onto reality,” pursued through delay and reworking^*1.

Ghent in the Late 1970s: Working Between Photography and Painting

When Braeckman was a student, artists such as Gerhard Richter were using photographs as material for painting, prompting renewed discussion of the functions of the two media. Braeckman was initially interested in Richter and began studying photography as a technique that might lead toward painting^*5. He gradually used the darkroom as a place closer to a painter’s studio, combining the camera’s record, the storage of negatives, and physical interventions on paper within one process. GRIMM describes the darkroom as a studio in which freedom, time, and chance operate^*6, while Unseen identifies his first darkroom experience as the starting point of work that continues today^*9. In the Belgian tendency later discussed by the Flanders Arts Institute as Turning Photography, a growing number of artists intervened in photographic procedures, with Braeckman positioned as an early example^*25. Records from Zeno X Gallery also show his sustained presentation of photography in contemporary art spaces since the 1980s^*15.

Delay After Exposure: Separating the Image from the Memory of the Event

Braeckman does not finish an image immediately after taking it. He accumulates negatives and selects among them again in the darkroom months or years later. In interviews, he describes creating distance from the memory of the place and event so that the image held by the negative can be treated as independent material^*5. With time, when, why, and with whom he was there recede from the criteria of selection. The negative can then be reconsidered as a surface on which light, fabric, skin, walls, and reflections compete. FK Magazine also addresses the relation between images produced through chance in the darkroom and a process of selection extended over long periods^*8.

Flash and Darkness: Retaining a Trace Without Fixing a Story

Flash creates localized reflections on walls, mirrors, fabric, and skin while letting surrounding information sink into gray and black. The Belgian Pavilion text notes that flash rebounds from the surface of the subject and that texture, focus, and cropping unsettle photographic convention^*16. S.M.A.K. describes A.D.F.-V.N.1-03 as a work made without staging in the artist’s immediate surroundings that nevertheless examines the ambiguity of understanding photography as a “window onto reality”^*4. A bright, even exposure would bring forward more information about the room or body. Localized light and deep shadow preserve evidence that something was there while making its identity and the events around it difficult to determine.

Negative, Chemistry, and Paper: Interrupting Automatic Reproduction

Braeckman leaves dust and scratches on negatives, alters chemicals and exposure, and rephotographs existing images. Glasstire explains that he physically manipulates negatives and light during development, producing differences even among prints within an edition^*13. When baryta paper is exhibited without glass, viewers confront the fibers of the paper, the density of the silver, and a surface that can be damaged. The Modern connects the tactile quality and variation of individual prints to a challenge to photographic reproducibility^*12. Exhibition records from Galerie Greta Meert likewise show large prints treated as objects within the arrangement of walls and light^*20.

L.O.-N.Y.-’94: Coding the Title and Withholding a Specific Story

The coded title L.O.-N.Y.-’94 does not fully disclose its location or subject. S.M.A.K. describes the work as an image that records reality while withholding narrative clues, allowing it to exist independently^*3. A hotel interior or wall carries the atmosphere of private memory, yet whose experience it contains remains uncertain. The title preserves a minimum of documentary information while creating distance from a biographical or event-based reading.

z.Z(t).: A Series Without Final Classification

S.M.A.K.’s exhibition z.Z(t).(’94–’01) presented works made between 1994 and 2001 as a group of images generated during the same period^*2. The abbreviation means “for the time being,” keeping the works from a final classification. Interiors, bodies, landscapes, and reproduced images are connected by density, surface, cropping, and reflection. The structure of the series reflects this later judgment of relations among images in the darkroom, with subject classification deferred beyond exposure.

The Belgian Pavilion in 2017: Paper, Wall, and Light as One Image

In 2017 Braeckman represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, showing approximately twenty new works and prints made from earlier negatives^*14. They were printed on baryta paper and installed without glass^*10. Mousse observed that the images held a pressure-like tension while the installation as a whole remained quiet^*11. Aperture emphasized the boundary between the visible and invisible and the materiality of the surface^*7, while Elephant connected the physical experience of the works with painterly thought^*17. At this scale, the gradual emergence of the dark image unfolded through an architectural experience that included distance between works, wall surfaces, and illumination.

Echtzeit: Reworking Photographs Beyond Their Original Use

For the 2024 FOMU exhibition Echtzeit, Braeckman selected photographs originally made for practical or documentary purposes and subjected them to repeated rephotography, printing, coating, abrasion, perforation, and rephotography. FOMU describes a structure in which the viewpoints of the original photographer, Braeckman, and the present viewer appear together^*21. With each intervention, the title, clarity, and setting that once guaranteed the image’s original use become less decisive; scratches, tonal range, paper, and cropping become new grounds for judgment. LE BAL likewise presented the rephotography of old negatives and magazine or web images as central to his work^*23. Applying delay and darkroom manipulation to existing photographs, the exhibition showed how an image moves away from its assigned use.

An Image Like an “Unexploded Bomb”: Tension Held Inside Stillness

Braeckman has compared his works to “unexploded bombs”: apparently quiet images that hold energy within them^*5. Rooms, bodies, fabric, and mirrors remain as traces in the dark picture, while information needed to establish what happened before and after is missing. Nearest Truth likewise treats flash, bodies, and the absence of titles or context as principal points of entry into the dark images^*19. Documentary evidence and the lack of explanation occupy the same surface, preventing the viewer from fixing meaning quickly and extending attention to the material image.

Photography and Painting: The Time of Making

Braeckman’s photographs are compared with painting for reasons that extend beyond dark color and blurred appearance. The time spent repeatedly working upon negatives and paper, producing differences from one print to another, resembles the temporal structure of a painter’s studio. De Pont explains that shower rooms, corridors, curtains, mattresses, and anonymous bodies are photographed in familiar surroundings yet appear to belong to another world^*22. A dialogue exhibition with Léon Spilliaert at Kunstmuseum Den Haag compared night, solitude, surface, and uncertainty of vision across different media^*24.

Turning Photography: Making Post-Exposure Procedures Part of the Work

From the 1990s onward, Belgian photography increasingly appeared in galleries and museums through work that examined photographic procedure itself, alongside its established roles in journalism and magazines. The Flanders Arts Institute’s Turning Photography names Braeckman and Geert Goiris as early examples, describing a shift from optical clarity toward darkroom chemistry and intervention on paper^*25. Goiris entrusts part of the image to the apparatus through long exposure; Braeckman continues touching the negative and paper after exposure, leaving the image’s history in scratches, chemicals, and rephotography. His contribution lies in asking what was done to the image after exposure with the same weight usually given to what stood before the camera.