Exhibition - "Flashbulb Memories, Ash Grey Prophecies" by Geert Goiris

During a recent trip to Amsterdam I had the opportunity to visit the exhibition "Flashbulb Memories, Ash Grey Prophecies" by Geert Goiris displayed at the Foam (Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam), a photography museum with four different exhibitions at any given time in which different photographic genres are shown, such as documentary, art and fashion.

Goiris occupies a unique position in the field of contemporary photography.
His layered photos of sublime landscapes, modernist architecture and reserved portraits possess a strange, unreal beauty with no perception of time and space, and are vaguely reminiscent of the visual language of post-apocalyptic feature films.
And yet everything that Goiris photographs is real. Nothing is photoshopped.
Many of his photos feature reminders of man's attempts to domesticate nature.
Goiris creates powerful images, in which he combines an almost universal perception of beauty with a subtle frisson of danger.
As well as being mental images, his photos are records of reality that generate room for stories, associations and suspense in the area of tension between fact and fiction.
The exhibition is entirely without daylight, and the oppressive atmosphere is intensified by spatial interventions and interaction between slide shows, framed photos of varying dimensions and enormous prints.

I gathered hereunder the photos I consider the most representative of the exhibition I visited.

I appreciate very much the simple, pure graphic touch of this shot, which was shown at the very beginning of the exhibition.

I like the very interesting light effect that the artist managed to create and I believe it gives to the picture a touch of magic.

I do not necessarily like the light grey shadows that can be perceived in the right part and on the central bottom of the frame, because I find that they distract the look from the real subject.

This is definitely my favourite photo.

The narrative of this shot is very intense and I think that this juxtaposition is simply perfect.

What are the children doing? Why did the bird die? What is the relation between them? Why so much pain? 

All these questions come to my mind and make me travel with my mind through the photo again and again, looking for more details, more answers.

This is exactly what a photographer should make me do. Great!

The rhino in the fog is dark and somehow scares me.

However, it is inoffensive, the threat is no longer there as it is too late: the powerful animal is gone, like eaten by the fog.

Very nice shot which won the Deutsche Borse award!

Goiris explains that the choice of his subjects depends. 

Sometimes they choose him instead of the other way around. 

In this series Resonance, for example, most of the photographs were made while he was traveling without a specific preconceived target, but with a camera. 

So when he came across inspiring people, places, animals, objects, atmospheres, or light conditions, he reacted on these in an improvised way. 

As if the photograph was already there in front of his eyes, and all he had to do was to record it.