People, as never before in human history, consume thousands of symbols through our technological devices. We comment, rank and like the content we like until the algorithms develop a pattern of our personality capable of predicting what we like to see and excluding from our screens everything that we dislike, causes repulsion or discomfort.

This technological mechanism, encouraged by a society focused on pleasure and satisfaction, has reinforced our habit of looking away from what bothers us. It has trained us to look uncompromisingly and to forget as quickly as possible the suffering and social injustice around us.

That is why it is not surprising that the first encounter with the series of photographs Life is (Not) a Miracle seems to us to be very raw, difficult to assimilate. Our eyes immediately turn to the overwhelming poverty and marginalization that is imposed on us and presented through emaciated bodies, wounds, filth, intoxication and violence as a reflection of an abyss full of tragedy and pain. 

However, when dragged by negative emotions we overcome our primary need to evade images and decide to keep our gaze on them, we are revealed, only at that moment, the true value of the story that is told to us.

Wilfried Vandenhove shows us nine years (1999-2008) of social work alongside young people in street conditions in Mexico City, but not as a documentary filmmaker or photographer.  His portraits go beyond aesthetic aspirations, pointing out the problem or giving presence to the socially invisible. There is not a hint of naivety or yellowing in his story. 

The photographs, taken mostly with a polaroid 600 capture fleeting moments. They denote ephemeral moments of intimacy between the subjects. There are no forced poses or elegant compositions. It is not the record of misery that motivates the photo or an editorial guideline, but the genuine and casuallink of friendship and camaraderie that makes you pay attention to people, their emotions and the context in which they operate.  

When we hold our gaze on his photographs, we are fleetingly participants in the moment, we discover the chiaroscuros of accompanying those whom society has discarded. We begin to notice the solidarity, the irony, the laughter, the exhaustion and the strength of the bonds. Subtly the distance between us, the photographer and the portrayed is shortened and we are shown the fragility of the human condition. 

Through his lens, Vandenhove reminds us that all human beings pursue dignity and are susceptible to falling when it is taken from us. That we need each other. That we live, die, suffer and celebrate the dichotomies of life equally. That the only way to understand that is to start by observing others, no matter how hard it is, by holding the gaze.

Written by (Spanish version): David Karminski Katz

Spell and style correction: Daniela Ekdesman Levi

Translation from Spanish to English: Daniela Ekdesman Levi

Mexico City, an early victim in the colossal downfull suffered by many Latin American, African and Asian capitals, is the backdrop for the work of Belgian photographer Wilfried Vandenhove. Vandenhove has lived for years in neighbourhoods housing some of the poorest people in Mexico City.

These chaotic settings contain the most haunting examples of the precariousness in which human life can exist.

His stark photographic essays throw a harsh light on the appalling urban scene whose inhabitants are forced to live in conditions of profound and morally indefensible squaler.

Inevitably condemned to social invisibility, their sole presence in images projects the despicable abyss we have contrived to create and strive to ignore.

C Photo Magazine

Vandenhove does not talk about his journeys, his experiences. He is not autobiographical, rather anti-biographical. Strange, he says, interested only for a moment. Then he sinks back into blind absence. The camera takes over from him. He wants to make an image, not to be in the world. The camera does not smell, touch, or even see. The dark hole in which everything disappears with a sigh. Imagine Columbus’ first step on this unknown ground. Suppose he enjoys that step so much that he wants to repeat it over and over. The movie trick with fast-forwarding and rewinding.

Suppose he never wants to take a second step and certainly not a third. Because with each next step, he scrapes the first away. Something like that happens here. The photographer has become unfamiliar, and does not want to. He never gets used to it, he never learns anything. His car is a small spaceship that flies over the surface of a planet with dozens of cameras and sensors. In a silent noise full of anonymous, cold, mechanical beauty that does not – never – need us. Like Mexico never asked for this photographer. Isn’t all photography really that: a voice in the void? He is constantly traveling from here to there. Here he is only for the time being. He has no permanent residence. That relationship without a name (a relationship about which one cannot speak, cannot speak) amazes me.

How does something like this translate into images? How does that affect the viewers here? Also now a cross movement: as a viewer you are here and you look at there. That trip costs me a bit of imagination (I have nothing to do with Mexico, at the most with Ribera and Cartier-Bresson, with Eisenstein and Bravo). A precious psychic journey! Not exactly at dump prices! However wide his panoramas (even wider! even wider! ), Vandenhove makes «unrooted» shots. The misplaced tourist curiosity, exoticism and dubious interest in people cannot settle in his images. A sentence of his along the lines of: I have no judgment, no emotion with what I see, explains a lot. He happens to be there, but not interested. detachment. However powerful the boxes often are, they do not express or explain, they do not analyze and glorify. In his car crammed with cameras at the ready, he sits as if in a capsule, like Columbus on his squat. His camera has long ceased to be an extension of the eye, the body and the heart. He is almost there denying it. Don’t touch me. Don’t upset me at all. But also something like: don’t explain anything to me, don’t explain yourself, don’t make me understand anything. This work of often powerful beauty is as shocking as photographs of the surface of a planet are. Like all photography that has mattered for half a century, it is the exploration of distance, of unwanted intimacy.

The title says it all: in the drumming of the wind through the open window of his speeding car there is an explosion of sound that coincides with silence. But that is the very essence of photography. Mexico. In that Latin American country, no, he did not take root, but found his model. The painter, the photographer is not concerned with her as a lover, but with her as a movement. As an attitude, expression, form with which he can do something, no, everything.

He returns here every few months. What does he call and feel what is «here» for us? He does not photograph here, his instruments have no raison d’être here. Here he talks, asks judgment, seeks support. Mexico is inadequate for that. The problem then is: who are you making these images for? For here? For there? Where is his address, his audience? A nasty situation.

Between the exoticism for us and the strange gaze for them there, the elusiveness of his work hovers. He tells in detail about what he experiences and does not understand, but he does not take pictures of it. He has never been “in” Mexico (except for one series). Years of visiting have not been able to bridge anything. He does not pretend to sympathize, to share a common humanity with the inhabitants. His work is numb. No, he says, what I see produces nothing in me. To really see these images, you have to take that sentence seriously.