(Pépinster, 1953 – Liège, 2019)

Pierre Houcmant was quickly introduced to the world of photography. His father, initially a schoolteacher, became a photography teacher. At a very young age, he began leafing through specialized magazines, with a particular interest in the Swiss journal Camera.

This magazine introduced him to the work of earlier photographers, such as Atget, Julia Margaret Cameron and Josef Sudek, to the iconography of the Bauhaus, and to the work of his contemporaries. At the same time, he learns to handle a Kodak Brownie and shoots by contact, photographing everything in a spirit not unlike Renger Patzsch’s exclamation, “The world is beautiful!”

At the age of nineteen, he enrolled at the Institut supérieur des beaux-arts Saint-Luc in Liège, where he studied with photographer Hubert Grooteclaes until 1974.

Commercial photography had little appeal for him. Only creative photography attracted him. Exploring underprivileged social circles, he took up reportage and soon showed an interest in portraiture. Sensitive to the poetry emanating from the work of Czech photographer Josef Sudek, known for his panoramic photographs of gardens and landscapes, Pierre Houcmant tried his hand at large-format photography.

On a trip to Prague, he met Jan Saudek, with whom he struck up a close friendship. He returned regularly to Czechoslovakia, visiting Bohemia and photographing its great landscapes.

Busy with a series he has named Interversions, he exhibits extensively abroad. However, his association with visual artists influenced by Marcel Duchamp shifted his interests towards works where concept takes precedence over emotion.

After a stay in India, he decided to settle in Amsterdam, where he obtained a studio at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. He stayed there for three years, where his work included a performance entitled Dialogue de Moules (Mould Dialogue), which denounced the state of art and the influence of the media on the perception of a given event.

In 1989, Pierre Houcmant moved to Antwerp, but was unable to establish contact with the city’s art scene, returning to Liège a year later.

In the early 1990s, he turned his attention to the fragmented image of the body. At the same time, he produced a series of portraits of writers, and is currently working on a book entitled Visages de l’écrit, in which they will be combined with reproductions of original manuscripts.