Max Pinckers

Max Pinckers is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels whose work interrogates the critical, technological, and ideological structures underpinning documentary images. He holds a Doctorate in the Arts from KASK in Ghent, where he also teaches, and founded the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary. For Pinckers, documentary is a speculative process in which reality and truth function as plural, malleable concepts. "One of the crucial things that distinguishes documentary from photojournalism is that documentary work is always self-reflexive and self-critical," he explains. "You're questioning your own positions and blind spots, as well as your own inability to actually represent reality." His practice deliberately foregrounds artifice to reveal photography's inherent limitations. "If I were to take the same picture without artificial lighting, it would be equally misleading," Pinckers argues. "By using it, I am trying to tell the viewer that it's a misleading representation." This leads to a broader epistemological position: "Photographs can't really claim to be factual, but neither are they lying to us. Maybe instead of experiencing images as objective representations, we should see them as proposals." Collaboration is central to his method, both with subjects and with other artists and researchers. His projects, including The Fourth Wall, Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty, and Margins of Excess, merge fact, fiction, found footage, and sculptural interventions into hybrid documentary forms. Pinckers received the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg in 2015 and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2018. He is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp.