thomas de wouters

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Is it art? Is it photojournalism? My aim, thanks to my work, is to bear witness by means of photographic writing, of social research as much as of artistic research.

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To bear witness to a life, sometimes hard, sometimes light, without ever losing the accurate framework which will reveal the emotion of an instant without distorting it by an artificial construction. A clear, direct shooting, a natural art and yet a quest for the beautiful beyond the reality sometimes unbearable offered to my camera.

My relation to time defines my technique. In choosing monochromatic film photography limited to 36 views rather than infinite digital, I oblige myself to think out each photograph. I look at, I walk, I question, I listen, I sniff, I think, I write with light on my films. None of this interferes with the unconstructed instant of photojournalism or streetphotography, but each photograph is the fruit of a journey.

I am a photographer looking to seize man in his daily life offered gross to the look without touching up or reframing.

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"Subject matter sets Thomas de Wouters’s images apart, as does his visual approach. His strange, square, black-and-white images look as if they were made by a 1960s-era New York street photographer set loose on the modern-day front.                                         James Estrin, New York Times