Stephan Vanfleteren

Why an honorary doctorate? 

03 August 2021. Stephan Vanfleteren receives the honorary doctorate from VUB in recognition of his strong commitment as a photographer and photojournalist to documenting people, their environment, and our society from a humanistic point of view, and for developing an authentic photographic style and visual language.

Photography as surfing

With the award of an honorary doctorate to Stephan Vanfleteren, VUB wishes to pay tribute to a photographer who connects present and past, life and death, concrete and nature, sadness and hope, dejection and resilience, loneliness and togetherness with the four primal elements water, earth, air, and light as a background. Each of his initiatives is preceded by careful observation and critical analysis of the subject and is underpinned by authentic humanist values which also inspire VUB.

Stephan Vanfleteren sees photography like surfing: you cannot catch every wave. And that is just as well. Otherwise, there would be no more longing. This longing that Vanfleteren expresses in his photography, together with his sharp analytical eye, his ability to make us think and move us with light and dark, black and white, has a special meaning for our university, whose core motto is 'Scientia Vincere Tenebras'.

About his career

Black and white in shades of emotion

Stephan Vanfleteren is born in 1969 into a middle-class family and spends his youth by the sea. Because he is a 'mediocre student' - his own words - in college, his parents send him to an art school. There he excels in what he himself calls the Esperanto for dyslexics: the language of images. While others stumble over floodlight, backlight, or bad light, he captures objects in the studio as though the task were nothing.

After his training in photography at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, he offers himself as a photographer to the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. He works there for ten years as a freelancer. His work also appears in other publications: Le Monde, Die Zeit, Knack, Humo, Volkskrant Magazine. 

Stephan Vanfleteren is a master of black-and-white photography. His portraits are both respectful and ruthless, masterfully summarising the story behind his subjects in a single image. They are, as it were, paragons of undiluted empathy and have been awarded numerous prizes: World Press Photo, European Fuji Awards, Louis Paul Boon Prize, Henri Nannen Prize, and more. 

Starting out as a press photographer, Vanfleteren gradually shifts his focus to his own reportage series and recently even to still lifes - in colour - of dead animals. The latter are also exhibited in his retrospective exhibition 'Present', which started in 2019 in the Antwerp Photo Museum. It became the museum's most visited exhibition ever. 

Vanfleteren's intrepid quest for light and darkness, meanwhile, continues. We look forward to his new work.

Esperanto for a dyslexic

At college, Vanfleteren struggles with words and letters. At art school, he excels in another language: that of the image.

Exceptional performance

With more than 100,000 visitors to ‘Present', Vanfleteren achieved the highest number of visitors ever to an exhibition in the Antwerp Photo Museum.

Stylist, also in words

For someone who struggled with words in his school years, Vanfleteren shows remarkable fluency in his 'diary of a photographer'.

Overcoming fear

In the beginning, Vanfleteren finds it difficult to photograph strangers frontally and up close. He overcomes this fear with a photo of Paul Delvaux.