With 'Lightness' Frieke Janssens has created a cathartic photo series, tapping into our urge to escape and our individual quest for a sense of purpose and meaning. Her compositions explore the visual dichotomy between weightlessness and gravity, water and air, aesthetics and imperfection. Using the sea and its eternal ebb and flow as a backdrop, the photographer contemplates the universally human. To what extent can we ever know or understand each other?
With contributions by Sofie Crabbé, Lize Spit and Thijs Demeulemeester.
In the past twenty years, Frieke Janssens (Bruges, b. 1980) has made a reputation for herself, both in Belgium and abroad, with striking, staged photos and evocative series such as 'Smoking Kids' (2011), 'Your Last Shot' (2012), 'Dianas' (2015) and 'Animalcoholics' (2016). Her photos often start from her own imagination, rather than reality. She uses her studio like a painter uses his canvas. In it, she can fully control all the photographic parameters, including light, the composition, her models, the setting and the backdrop.