© Jacques Sonck – Untitled

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PRESENTED BY GALLERY FIFTY ONE:

Jacques Sonck (°1949, BE) studied photography at Narafi, Brussels and worked as a photographer at the Cultural Department of the Province of Antwerp until his retirement in 2009. For his personal work, he has been focussing exclusively on analogue black-and- white portrait photography since the mid-1970s. Sonck has an eye for the extraordinary; across all ages, genders and races, he is attracted by individuals who stand out from the crowd, either by an anomaly in their appearance or by their extravert attitude or clothing- style. Notwithstanding the, by times, confrontational nature of his portraits, Sonck is never guilty of voyeurism or ridicule as he approaches his subjects unbiased and with respect. Seen together, his comic, tragic, melancholic and joyous portraits form an in-depth study of the human condition. Sonck’s oeuvre reads like an eccentric cross-section of Flemish society from the 1970s onwards. It is a catalogue of all the different types of people that are part of a community, linking his images to the work of other portrait photographers like August Sander, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus – the latter with whom he shares a fascination for people on the margins of society.