“To me, photography is capturing a single moment of the ordinary live and transform this into an image which eludes a feeling no words can describe.”
Virginie Vlaminck
Virginie has been a professional photographer since 1991. She studied photography at the Academy of Arts in Ghent, Belgium, which is her country of origin. In her last year she studied at the Arts and Design College of Bournemouth in the U.K, the start of her overseas adventure. A move to Guinea in West Africa in 1994 triggered a big life change and consequently formed her photography style. After Guinea-Conakry she lived in Nigeria and in Ghana for ten years.
Her work in West Africa was mainly ‘analogue black & white street photography’. Her exhibitions would show her black & white photos and the work of other artists using her photographs as templates to create multimedia art. During her stay in the Middle East and Asia she entered the digital photography era, which made her the artist she is today.
Virginie followed a workshop in Dubai on Photoshop and the use of Raw format to allow her to create digital art using her photographs. Since August 2011, Virginie is living in Chennai, ‘a dream come true’. Outside the strictly academic definitions, we recognise the work of Virginie Vlaminck as Street Photography. Here, more than ever, the purpose of the photographic search is a view on humanity with an aesthetic requirement, even if “aesthetics” does not always mean “beauty”.
A geometric order, an arrangement of lines, shapes, men and shadows blend into her constructions, and exist in situations that sometimes can look unacceptable or socially intolerable. Don’t forget Photography is a personal journey of initiation, a trail to self-knowledge and the world.
© Copyright Denis Finnegan 2014