Carmen de Vos

Tales of Self-Illumination (self Portrait)

2001

Belgian photographer Carmen De Vos shoots polaroids to frame her mental escapades. They get so easily out of hand. She thinks up situations and collects fantasies. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the late TicKL-Magazine. Carmen De Vos is a slow photographer. She registers, portrays and thinks up odd stories. She enormously longs for what she’s afraid to lose: real human contact, the slowness of being and creating, the tangibility of materials. Almost without exception, she uses old polaroid cameras, long time expired film and self-made filters. Her tools and methods, such as film bleaching and deliberate film obstruction, are not precise and are not even geared towards a perfect representation. They often yield results, such as colorization, deformation, unsharpness, which she could never have predicted on forehand with any certainty because their flaws do not allow for calculation. She’s not in control. She fights the material. She plans, stages and directs but the decayed chemistry and off-focus lenses add their magic, all by themselves, which merrily surprises her or ruins her image. This battle attracts her as much as it frustrates her. She loves to create within these limitations, to try to produce the best possible image within the narrow circumstances given. Luckily, she’s a sucker for imperfections. Once upon a time, she found herself guilty of home-crafted mischiefs for TicKL, her English art porn Polaroid magazine. She can’t help but travel back to these blessed times of free-love photography with her Polaroids.