• Griet Van de Velde

by Dieter Debruyne, for Democratic Jungle, 2016, Belgium

As a child, Griet Van de Velde, loved to look at the tiny black and white prints in her grandfather’s family-book. As a teenager, she stopped believing in the reality of pictures. Like every serious photographer, she stopped believing the lie. Her approach towards photography is deliberately the one of a novice, making belief there has been an untrained eye at work. Look at it as if she’s photographing in the way an adult can try to draw like a child. Griet wants to be surprised by a moment of light and/or shadow which turns the ordinary into poetry. She also is very much fascinated by vernacular installations; human kind’s (un)-conscious constructions. Griet does not ‘hunt’ for images, she rather ‘gathers’ moments on her way. With every take she tries to go back to the early years of her naïve eye, but then again, balances it with training by time and dialogue. Her initial concern is the photograph, the moment. With too much thinking the naïve point of view would get lost.