Photography between fact and fiction

The mausoleum of the Vietnamese communist leader and later president Ho Chi Minh has received tens of millions of visitors since it opened in 1975. Yet we do not know what the heart of the building, where the embalmed body of the revolutionary lies, looks like. Photography is prohibited there, and apparently security never fails.

Except for that time when Lieven Lefere (°1978) was there, it seems. Because he does have images of the sanctum sanctorum. No, not really. ‘La raison des ombres’, as one of Lefere’s photos is called, shows a convincing wooden reconstruction, made based on a documentary he once saw about the construction of the tomb. Previously, Lefere, together with Charles Verraest, did something similar for ‘General Assembly’. That image seems to show what the title suggests, but it doesn’t give us either the real thing. Lefere and Verraest painstakingly recreated the United Nations pulpit in New York.

These reconstructions are painstaking work. Months of work go into getting the proportions, colors, light and shadows correct. Right, but not completely. In their UN image, there is no shiny golden wall like you see in New York, but a chessboard motif that exudes geopolitical calculation. There are stray papers and a bundle of cloth on the floor. Can someone come and clean it up as soon as possible, please?

How do truth and lies present themselves in photography? Can a simulation be more meaningful than the original? Can fake be truer than fact? These questions have occupied Lieven Lefere throughout his career. If there is one answer, one piece of advice that runs like a common thread through his oeuvre, it is this: don’t believe too quickly what you see. Look critically, look slowly until (Sehrlangam), as his current exhibition in Roeselare is called. Look beyond the picture, look outside the frame.

Soldiers and stone throwers

The photographic lie or distortion comes in many shapes and forms. Adnan Hajj was fired by the Reuters news agency in 2006 when it emerged that he had cloned smoke plumes in his footage of an Israeli airstrike on Beirut. In 2014, AP freelancer Narciso Contreras was suspended after he photoshopped away a colleague’s camera in a photo of a Syrian rebel. Removing disturbing elements from the image is something that the great Steve McCurry also enjoys, as it turned out in 2016. A person or pole that disfigures the composition: get rid of it. McCurry defended himself by describing himself as a ‘visual storyteller‘. He should be allowed more freedoms than a press or documentary photographer.

The manipulations of Hajj, Contreras and McCurry are blatant. Sometimes things are more complicated. In his book They’re just people (2006), former Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk describes an almost ritualistic alliance between press photographers, Israeli soldiers and so-called stone throwers in the Palestinian territories. He saw it with his own eyes several times. “Suddenly they appeared in quick succession: Israeli jeeps, who must have come out of their barracks especially for this purpose, and Palestinian boys for whom it was also a long walk from school. A few spectators arrived, an ambulance, a cart with falafels and a camera crew. Then the boys started throwing stones. The Israelis fired into the air. The boys ventured closer and the Israelis fired into the air again. (…) Were there cameras here because something happened, or did something happen because there were cameras?” Are those photographers capturing a lie? No. Do they record a reality that they may have created themselves? Or again: have they manipulated reality? Perhaps.

Shooting skulls

Lieven Lefere never went to the front for his art, but he was already involved in warfare – or better: with a kind of re-enactment of it. Skulls, a series for which he collaborated with Martin Smith, a forensic anthropologist at Bournemouth University, shows not real skulls but simulations of polyurethane, which is close in hardness to bone and used in archeology to study the impact of crossbows and ancient musket balls . The photos are a kind of “reconstructions of atrocities, high-tech imitations of age-old scenes, made in a sterile, scientific environment,” Tim Vanheers wrote in an essay about Lefere’s work. In a text accompanying those skull images, Smith reminds us of the oft-quoted axiom that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” In other words: through some lies you get closer to the truth. This also applies to Lefere’s work.

Places where making images is forbidden, age-old warfare: Lefere is fascinated by the unphotographable, by what lies beyond the reach of his medium. Inspired by David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The beginning of everything (2021), a dazzling new history of humanity, he made images at Neolithic sites in England last summer. He always photographed in the evening, at the last daylight, sometimes with the addition of flash. The shadows and dark recesses are at least as important as what we can clearly see. They represent the unknown, not knowing. They are a sign of humility. And they are the reason to keep searching, to keep looking.

Lieven Lefere: (Sehr Langsam) Until June 30 in Ter Posterie, Ooststraat 35, Roeselare. The monograph (Sehr Langsam), published by Hopper & Fuchs, will be published on May 30.