Living-room live

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Imagine having a group of world-class musicians playing in your living-room for a whole Sunday afternoon.

Each year, Brussels-based world music promoter Muziekpublique takes ten acts 'on the road' in a different city district. This year, it was the turn of the Solvay quarter of Ixelles, my own commune. I managed to catch half-hour concerts by five acts, three of which included a dancer.

The gigs I saw included classical Indian song and dance, a Syrian whirling dervish, Brazilian 'choro', flamenco guitar, and traditional Congolese dance. Each would have been spell-binding in a theatre. But in an ordinary living-room, with the artists literally within touching distance, they were extraordinary. 

Photographing the concerts, I tried to capture the atmosphere of the different homes that provided their settings, and the interactions between the performers and the audiences. 

Photographing families – beyond the studio portrait

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Last weekend I photographed a young family in their home just outside Brussels. It was the second time in a week that a client had told me: "We want something less formal, more spontaneous."

I had a great time, chatting with the parents, sitting on the floor with the children (aged three and one), and getting really close as they became absorbed in a story or a game. I started shooting the moment I arrived, and in the two hours I was there I don't think I even asked for a head to be turned more than two or three times.

A tripod or a flash would have made it much harder to get the children – and perhaps the parents, too – to relax and be themselves. So I was pleased that there was midday light pouring in through a big picture window. I shot fairly wide open in order to separate my subjects from the background clutter of furniture and toys. But despite that, I had to compromise with shutter speed and ISO, except for the 15 minutes when we went out into the garden.

Technically, the resulting images are not as perfect as those that a studio photographer would have produced. But nor are they stiff or stilted. They capture the personalities of four members of a family on a particular day in the winter of 2017, enjoying one another's company in their own environment. That is, after all, what my clients wanted. And they are super happy with the results.

I'm not posting any images of the children here, because the parents specifically asked me not to publish these online.

 

The event photographer is hungry

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On Tuesday evening I covered a reception and dinner at the European Parliament for the European Ceramic Industry Association. There were 100 guests, 7 speeches, 4 courses and I took over 500 pictures in the space of nearly 4 hours.

As always, I met some extremely nice people, including Giuseppe from Bologna. We got talking, and it turned I out I that I had actually visited his tile factory in 1983.

You might think that a European industry get-together would not be much fun. But if you enjoy photographing people as much as I do then it is a sheer delight to spend an entire evening with 100 willing subjects. As I got to know them, some posed, some fooled around and some played shy. Most simply ignored me. Meanwhile, I could take my time to stalk the room, picking my angles and my moments.

I wasn't bored, but I certainly did get hungry. As the evening wore on, one of the waiters took pity on me and brought me some food and wine. I wanted to make a portrait of her but she said she didn't like photographs.