Represented
Bram Osselaer
b. 1974, Ghent
Lives and works in Ghent
Civic buildings photographed on 8 by 10 film in exposures long enough to erase everyone who used them that day.
Bram Osselaer photographs public buildings: tax offices, swimming pools, provincial courts, the kind of post-war civic architecture that European cities are currently deciding whether to keep. He works with a large format camera on 8 by 10 sheet film and exposures that run from forty minutes to a full working day, using stacked neutral density filters to get there.
At those durations people do not appear. A queue of two hundred visitors leaves no trace. What registers instead is the building itself, plus the movement of light across it, plus the very slow things: a shadow crossing a facade, a flag, the drift of a cloud bank. Osselaer is straightforward about the effect. The buildings were designed for crowds and the pictures show them empty, which is not a metaphor he invented, only one he found.
He prints in platinum palladium at a fixed size, 51 by 61 centimetres, in editions of three. The process is slow and the tonal range is long and flat, which suits the subject. Osselaer has been working on the series since 2008 and has photographed 214 buildings. Thirty-one of them have since been demolished.
His work is in the collections of FOMU Antwerp, the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Rijksmuseum. He has been with the gallery since 2015.
