Stephan Vanfleteren

In 2020, Fotomuseum Antwerp organized a major retrospective, Present, which followed Vanfleteren's thirty years of photography, with personal reflections: from street photography in cities such as New York to the Rwandan genocide, from store facades to the "darkly beautiful" remains of the Atlantic Wall, from still lifes to portraits.

In 2018, he published Surf Tribe, for which he had made a months-long journey around the world, making portraits of surfers. He went to the most celebrated beaches for surfing, but also little-known places in order to portray the most famous surfers, champions as well as unknown amateurs. He did not photograph them in motion but instead captured their static portraits on the beach.

In 2016, Vanfleteren made a series of photographs for an exhibition, Stil leven, at the Museum Oud Amelisweerd [Wikidata] (MOA), in Bunnik. Rejecting the museum's initial request for photographs of the Atlantic Wall, he let himself be influenced by the environment of the museum and the surrounding park to realize a series of nudes, still lifes with dead animals, in both black and white and colour. His photos form a dialogue with the work of the painter Armando, the building, and the surrounding nature.

Vanfleteren was the fifth (after Bernard Plossu [Wikidata], Dave Anderson, Jens Olof Lasthein and Claire Chevrier) in a series of photographers to be provided with a residency at the Museum of Photography [Wikidata] in Charleroi. He produced a series of photographs, including many portraits, taken in that city, which had been greatly affected by deindustrialization. These were exhibited in the museum in 2015. The exhibition was described on RTBF as "a tender look at a harsh reality", and as having links to the work of August Sander and Walker Evans yet being the product of a singular vision. A review in Moustique said:

With rare exceptions, Vanfleteren has only photographed in black and white. However, in 2013 he published a series of colour photographs, taken several years earlier, of old wall advertisements, facades destined for demolition or abandoned shop windows; these appeared in a lavishly produced book, Façades & Vitrines.

Co-founder of the publishing company Uitgeverij Kannibaal/Hannibal, he is also its artistic director. Since 2010, he has been a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.

As an international project, Vanfleteren has given faces to numerous people living in poverty and isolation in Antwerp and Brussels. "While I focused on their eyes, I listened to their experiences." In 2009 these portraits, along with others, became the subject of an exhibition at Le Botanique, a cultural centre in Brussels. Most were taken with one of Vanfleteren's four Rolleiflexes, as their waist-level finders allowed him to get close.

From September 2007 to February 2008, the exhibition Belgicum was held at Fotomuseum Antwerp (FoMu). A review in La Libre described this:

In May 1999, Vanfleteren travelled around the USA with his friend the Swiss photographer Robert Huber [Wikidata], in the footsteps of their idol Elvis Presley. They photographed each other, "in identical white jumpsuits, mirror shades and high-rise hair", as "Elvis" (Huber) and "Presley" (Vanfleteren), in humdrum scenes from Times Square to Death Valley. Vanfleteren photographed in black and white, Huber in colour. This led to Vanfleteren's first major book and an exhibition. Both photographers, said a reviewer of the exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery, showed themselves to "have a fine eye for ironic composition".

In 1993, while awaiting military service, he made a trip to New York, where he mostly did street photography. He has described New York as his "entrance ticket" to the profession of photography.

Vanfleteren started out as primarily a photojournalist for the newspaper De Morgen. In this role, he covered, in black and white, stories of the 1990s such as the death of King Baudouin, the protests over the Clabecq ironworks [Wikidata], the Kosovo War, the Rwandan genocide, and the Dutroux affair. He also found time for stories far from the headlines, such as the experience of riding boxcars in the American northwest.

In the same year, at Wintercircus Mahy [Wikidata], Ghent, Vanfleteren exhibited Portret 1989–2009, around two hundred portraits in black and white of people who had had some media presence during the previous two decades. The exhibition then went on tour.

Stephan Vanfleteren (born 1969) is a Belgian photographer, best known for his portraits in black and white and his depictions of Belgium and abroad.

Stephan Vanfleteren was born in Kortrijk in 1969, and was brought up in Oostduinkerke. He studied photography at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels from 1988 to 1992.