Michel Beine
Lives and works in Liège
Michel Beine, born in Brussels in 1967, graduated in photography from the Institut Saint- Luc in Liège, where he now teaches photography in evening classes. Would it be fair and useful to summarize Michel Beine’s photographic career in terms of three essential stages? Would it be fair to say that Cuba was an impregnating experience for him? Morocco, a literary and refined stroll? And America, a journey through time as well as a photographic initiation, along a retrospective path?
Michel Beine’s documentary photography is reminiscent of Walker Evans. Median distance, medium affect, minute details, intelligences of things lodged more in sensation than sentimentality, and even the intimate smells of past leather or sun-scorched earth.
The discreet testimony of a photographer with the right tone, who tries to remain on the bangs of this era, where we tend to throw away the tangible and unusual material of days gone by, the better to project ourselves into the illusion of tomorrow, chimerical horizons, the intoxication of speed, the effects of emphasis.
Excerpts from “Somnambule Amérique” by Emmanuel d’Autreppe 2008