Stine Sampers
Belgian photographer Stine Sampers extracts universal themes such as love, loss and regret from a personal collection of anecdotes, obsessions, interests and occupation. Her photos are in fact a sort of visual diary.
“I am still creating my own symbolism, I keep thinking up layers and try adding other dimensions to seemingly simple landscapes and portraits.”
While formally her photos might look as if they were influenced by renaissance portraits and expressionist paintings, the stories underneath are highly personal .
Growing up in small Belgian village, her boredom with her surroundings and the given circumstances, encouraged her to try and make it look more beautiful, less plain, more theatrical. Small events, small, small feelings. But what an impact those things have when you start looking at them as through a magnifier. If you start focussing intensely.
Ever since she moved to the city, looking at those photos helped her to appreciate her roots, where she came from and an opposite movement rose, she started missing the simplicity and calmness, and that’s exactly what her works tries to communicate now: simplicity, sheer thoughts and relationships based on clarity. Honesty is something to cherish, but the human mind is too torn, too much of a duality to be completely honest. She approaches photography as the mimesis of life, with room left for poetry. Complex delusion.
