Charleroi

About the exhibition in Charleroi

The exhibition in Charleroi is a collaboration with the Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi.

From 2009 to 2015, the Musée de la Photographie organised, monitored and exhibited five photographic missions focusing on the city of Charleroi, the results of work by photographers Bernard Plossu, Dave Anderson, Jens Olof Lasthein, Claire Chevrier and Stephan Vanfleteren.

Faced with the first signs of change in the urban landscape at the end of the 2000s, the Musée de la Photographie wanted to capture in a series of photographs the face of Charleroi in the midst of transformation, before the memory of its physiognomy before these major works was lost. In this sense, the five photographic missions anticipate history by providing important historical sources for documenting the transformation of a city that has been in industrial decline for decades. 

Of course, this was by no means a new approach, since from the middle of the 19th century, when photography had only been around for a decade, a number of cities and countries had launched large-scale photographic campaigns to keep track of the past.

The exhibition presents a selection of works by the two photographers most attached to the city of Charleroi who accomplished this mission, Dave Anderson and Jens Olof Lasthein. They were given complete freedom in the way they approached things, with the only watchword being ‘to photograph Charleroi’. With their outsider's perspective allowing them to step back, they each did it in their own way.