Carl De Keyzer (1958)

Carl De KEYZER (Kortrijk, December 27, 1958) is a Belgian photographer.

He studied photography at the Academy of Ghent. Since 1994 he has been a member of the photo collective Magnum.

De Keyzer was good at playing football and taking pictures at a young age. After high school, he studied veterinary medicine at Ghent University. After six months he went to the academy to experiment with photography, film and philosophy. In 1982 De Keyzer became a teacher at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He would stay there until 1989. Work

In 1982 De Keyzer founded the gallery for photography XYZ together with Dirk Braeckman and Marc Van Roy (the name was a playful allusion to the nearby and well-known sex cinema ABC). They invited the world's most important photographers to them. The gallery was not profitable, but De Keyzer came into contact with the better photographers and their work. He published De Keyzer's first book, Oogspanning, in 1982. A finger exercise.

India, the result of five months of traveling through the country in a period of three years, was published in 1987. De Keyzer shows his style there for the first time. The photos were internationally noticed and published in (appendices of) the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Independent.

Homo Sovieticus (about the Soviet Union in the pre-glasnost and perestroika years) was published in 1989. These photos also received international interest. De Keyzer could no longer combine his free work with the gallery: XYZ was closed down.

After De Keyzer traveled through the United States for a year, he published the book God Inc. in 1992, in which religious experience and nationalism in the US are the theme.

In 1990 he was nominated as a member of Magnum, associated in 1992 and finally became a full member in 1994. De Keyzer embarks on an ambitious project about power, war and politics: three series of historical scenes that he will eventually work on for sixteen years. Tableaux d'histoire, Tableux de guerre and Tableaux politiques together form the magisterial work Trinity (2008).

In the meantime, East of Eden was published in 1996 (about the events in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall), in 2000 EVROPA (about the route that namesake Emperor Charles took through Europe and what remains), in 2003 Zona ( about Siberian prison camps) and in 2004 Unvarnished (about young offenders in a Belgian juvenile detention center).

At the end of 2009 the photo book Congo (belge) was published, in which De Keyzer, guided by a travel guide from 1950, searches for the remnants of the Belgian colonization in the Congo from 2003-2009. For this book, published by Lannoo, writer David Van Reybrouck selected the text fragments and quotes.

In 2012, 'Moments before the Flood' will run from 17 May to 28 August in the Maritime Site of Ostend, after a journey along 140,000 kilometers of European coastal strip.