Carmen de Vos

Flying Freelance Portrayer. Purveyor, chronicler and archivist of exquisite photographic peculiarities. Carmen De Vos is a slow photographer. She registers, portrays and invents odd stories. She shoots Polaroids to frame those mental escapades, which get so easily out of hand. She yearns for what she’s afraid to lose: genuine human contact, the slowness of being and creating, the tangibility of materials. She uses, almost without exception, old Polaroid cameras, long 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 like colourization, deformation or unsharpness – results she could never have predicted beforehand with any degree of certainty, because these flaws do not allow for calculation. She’s not in control. She fights the material. She plans, stages and directs, but the decaying chemistry of the film and the out-of-focus lenses add their magic all by themselves. That leads to either pleasant surprises or ruined images. 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. Luckily, she’s a sucker for imperfections.