Bieke Depoorter earned her master’s in photography from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2009 and became a full member of Magnum Photos by 2016. She has received numerous awards, including the Magnum Expression Award, the Larry Sultan Award, and the Prix Levallois, and was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize for her solo exhibition A Chance Encounter at C/O Berlin. Depoorter exhibits internationally and has published several books, including Ou Menya, I am About to Call it a Day, As it May Be, Sète#15, X., and her latest, Blinked Myself Awake (2024). In this recent work, she turns the camera inward, blending diaristic text with imagery of amateur astronomers in an effort to reconnect with lost childhood memories and explore universal questions.
Across her career, Depoorter has consistently questioned the boundaries of the photographic medium. Her work can often begin with a chance encounter and evolves into collaborations with her subjects, as seen in As it May Be, where those depicted annotated her images, and X., a deeply personal project exploring identity and performance through a prolonged exchange with a woman she met in a nightclub. In Sète#15 and the film Dvalemodus, she experimented with fictionalizing reality, turning her subjects into characters within imagined narratives. Her ongoing project Michael investigates the life and disappearance of a man who entrusted her with his personal archive—an inquiry that continues her exploration of authorship, representation, and truth in photography.
