218 | Mannequins #7

Antwerp is a wealthy city known for diamonds, fashion and its nightlife. People here dress well and live well. There is also a thriving cultural scene and the shopping streets are also a venue for some amazing musicians who set up for impromptu street performances.

I came here for a break and did not intend for a big photography project. It is just over an hour away by train so for now I just wanted to get a feel for the place, understand it's layout and get the tourist stuff out of the way so that when I come back I can head further off the beaten track and discover more of the city. 

I spent the afternoon at the city's photography museum, the FoMu and took in 2 exhibits:

American Documents - documentary photography trends since the 1970s including the work of Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Henry Wessel, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Martha Rossler, Judith Joy Ross, Jerry Thomson, Larry Sultan, Mike Mandel and Mitch Epstein, together with the work of their predecessors Walker Evans and Robert Frank.

The next exhibit was the life work of Antwerp photographer Filip Tas, a figurehead of Belgian photography in the second half of the twentieth century. He left an archive of 20,000 to 30,000 photos covering photojournalism, travel photography and fine art photography. It was a tremendous and varied body of work - all the more bewildering when you consider that he would have shot this collection on film. His work pushed boundaries and has a very distinctive style. I struggled through a video archive of interviews - it was my first encounter with Flemish and I still have to concentrate to follow along with spoken Dutch - but it was well worth it, he was clearly very passionate and opinionated about his work. I found it particularly interesting to hear him take part in a discussion about how the advent of television news would lead to the demise of newspaper journalism. It echoed the current debate on how the internet media will impact traditional print media.

Both exhibits were stunning, wide-ranging in subject matter and thought provoking. So much to take in that I skipped the remaining ones. There is a limit to how much I can take in in one afternoon without feeling over-saturated with new images.

I am definitely planning to go back to Antwerp both for photography and to take in future exhibits, next time I want to visit the other two major art museums - the Muhka (contemporary art) and the Royal Fine Art Museum.

As for tonight's photo, I was inspired by Eli Reinholdtsen's Chasing Reflections ebook to spend my time gazing into the many shop windows of Antwerp looking for layered reflections. It is more of a daytime subject when there is bright sunshine to intensify the reflections. In the past, I have often been drawn to reflections but reading Eli's ebook inspired me to think about reflections differently, it's a fascinating read and something to try and explore further in a night time context.