Artist Talks - Maxime Matthys

Maxime Matthys Talk – The Photographers’ Gallery

As a part of my professional development planning blog, I was required to attend multiple talks in regard to my studies, at galleries, in order to gain further insight into the photography industry and what it’s like to be working within it. I decided to attend a talk at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, online, with the photographer Maxime Matthys who is a performance and documentary photographer from Belgium. Maxime Matthys’ work focuses on the creation of narrative through documentary photography. By focusing on these themes, his work often links to the theme of narrative by creating photographs that resonate with real-life and controversial issues as shown within his project titled ‘2091: The Ministry of Privacy’ which was shown and discussed in the talk put on by The Photographers’ Gallery.


‘2091: The Ministry of Privacy’ is a project based around narrative and documentary photography,
focusing on the real-life issues that were happening in the city of Kachgar, China. This project showcases a series of work that is created to inform the audience about the issues with human rights and oppression that were happening at the time in Kachgar, China since the government were using facial recognition CCTV and technology to monitor everyone’s actions through the day. Within this project, the artist, creates these photographs to document the everyday life of the people living and working in Kachgar, China which he then uploaded into facial recognition software creating the biometric data on the subjects’ faces. By combining these two methods, his work and project take on an almost controversial and shocking appearance to his target audience, raising awareness of the government’s actions and the issues that this would cause within Kachgar.


His focus on these themes and subjects within his photographic projects leads to a lot of contrasting imagery being made since it both obscures the subjects’ faces from the image whilst also highlighting their presence within the photograph. I feel that the use of the biometric data visible within his work, the artist, has managed to make a focal point and leading lines of focus that draw in the attention of his target audience whilst also informing them of the controversial and issues around the Chinese government, human rights, and oppression. The other area of focus within Maxime Matthys’ work, is the compositions he takes his photographs in. He often keeps the compositions very close-up despite taking the photos of numerous people in Kachgar going about their daily lives, this creates a very intense and intrusive atmosphere within the imagery he creates which I feel also links to his chosen theme of focus.


Whilst researching the work of Maxime Matthys and attending the online talk at The Photographers’
Gallery I realised a few similarities between his work and my own. A lot of my own photographic work is inspired through the themes of narrative and storytelling, emotions, and atmosphere whilst also using colour and shape to further emphasize these themes of focus, evident in both my music and concert photography as well as my editorial and more personal photography. Attending the talk at The Photographers’ Gallery has given me a lot of insight into the way that I portray my themes within my own photography and how it can be developed further with my knowledge gained from the analysis of Maxime Matthys’ work and the talk at the gallery.

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