Katrien Vermeire2005, in coproduction with Contour Mechelen vzw
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Belgium
°1979, De Haan
lives in Ghent
“Katrien Vermeire is a remarkable young Flemish photographer. I experience her work as something very musical. I will never forget some of her pictures. They are special, harmonious as well as full of dissonants, both natural and artificial. There is the picture of the girl taken from the back. She is standing in a dark garden, but she gets a lot of light from the right. The pit in her arm becomes deeper, her red hair milder and her blouse more lusciously draped. Both she and the photographer are looking in the same direction. It is not a portrait, but a situation. Mostly, we want to see people from the front, their eyes, their lips and their breasts. But this back also reveals a lot of intimacy, especially in that light.
Katrien Vermeire also makes wonderful pictures of landscapes. They are soft, under a cloudy sky. Her landscapes are shamelessly charming and even symmetrical, with friendly tones. Like many other photographers, she works with themes and assignments, but the subject is almost never important. The most striking is the graciousness of it all. She has also made pictures for the Flemish Opera, a series about the Schelde and a book about powerful women. Each time the pictures seem to resemble an English garden, with their magnificent interaction between the obvious and the artificial."