Carl De Keyzer

Carl De Keyzer (Kortrijk, December 27, 1958) is a Belgian photographer. He studied photography at the Academy of Ghent. Since 1994 he has been a member of the photo collective Magnum.

De Keyzer was good at playing football and photography at a young age. After high school he studied veterinary medicine at Ghent University. After six months he went to the academy to experiment with photography, film and philosophy. In 1982 De Keyzer became a teacher at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He would stay there until 1989.

In 1982, De Keyzer founded the XYZ photography gallery together with Dirk Braeckman and Marc Van Roy (the name was a playful reference to the nearby and well-known sex cinema ABC). They invited the photographers that were most important to them. The gallery was not profitable, but De Keyzer thus came into contact with the best photographers and their work. He published De Keyzer’s first book Oogspanning (eye tension), in 1982.

India, the result of five months of traveling across the country in a period of three years, was published in 1987. De Keyzer shows his own style for the first time. The photos were noticed internationally and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Independent.

In 1989 Homo Sovieticus (about the Soviet Union in the years before the glasnost and perestroika) was published. These photos also received international attention. De Keyzer could no longer combine his free work with the gallery: XYZ was closed.

After De Keyzer traveled through the United States for a year, in 1992 he published the book God Inc., which deal with the themes of religion and nationalism in the US.

In 1990 he was nominated as a member of Magnum, was associated in 1992 and finally bacame a full member in 1994. De Keyzer embarks on an ambitious project about power, war and politics: three series of historical scenes on which he will eventually work for sixteen years. Tableaux d’histoire, Tableux de guerre and Tableaux politiques together form the masterly work Trinity (2008).

In the meantime, East of Eden (about the events in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall) was published in 1996, EVROPA (about the route taken by the namesake Charles V through Europe and what remains of it) in 2000, Zona ( about Siberian prison camps) and in 2004 Unvarnished (about young offenders in a Belgian juvenile prison).

At the end of 2009 the photo book Congo (belge) was published, in which De Keyzer, led by a travel guide from 1950, searches for the remnants of the Belgian colonization in the Congo from 2003-2009. For this book, published by Lannoo, writer David Van Reybrouck selected the text fragments and quotations.