Sidelines

His long career as a photojournalist has involved travelling all over the world. In the coming days, the Belgian photographer will be 78 years old. A comprehensive photo book was published already last year, marking his first major retrospective, at the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium. The title, Sidelines, says it all – because Vink never tried to be at the centre of conflicts and crises, but instead focused on the consequences of the devastation. He never saw himself as a war reporter, but chose to photograph the everyday lives of his contemporaries who were suffering from the aftermath of wars and humanitarian disasters. As he says, his work is all about belonging, about home, but also about loss and desolation. “I don’t see myself as an adventurer, but the attraction was greater than the fear.”

The most important starting points, and the regions he repeatedly returned to, were his homeland of Belgium, and Cambodia. His passion for journalism was triggered in Brussels. This was where his father ran the Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper. “It was, indeed, where I caught the bug,” he says, after experiencing the atmosphere of the editorial offices and the printer. A second source of inspiration played a role: in the family cellar, there were piles of issues of LIFE magazine, which impressed him and cemented his decision to become a photographer. When he was 18, he was sitting with Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt at the edge of the Francorchamps and Zolder race tracks, taking pictures of sports cars racing by. These became his first published pictures. However, the photographer considers that it all really began when he was working with director Christian Caujolle, as a founding member of the Agence VU. Above all, Vink’s collaboration with Parisian newspaper Libération opened up new perspectives. His reportage Water in the Sahel, which won the Eugene Smith Award in 1986, gained him international renown. In 1997, he became a full member of Magnum Photos, until leaving the agency twenty years later. During those years, he continued to develop his multi-layered body of work, which repeatedly revolves around the resilience and cultural identity of peoples and communities.

Vink photographed all across the globe. Despite, or maybe because of his extensive travelling, he was later overcome by a feeling of superficiality. He longed for a place to settle, and so Cambodia became his home of choice for sixteen years, starting in the year 2000. “I wanted to watch how a country grows and develops, and everything that this involves,” he remembers. “In sixteen years, Cambodia did what it took us in the West fifty years to do. Economically anyway, because it paid an enormous social price, as social inequality mushroomed.”

Vink returned to Belgium ten years ago. The selections he has chosen for the eight chapters of black and white images in this photo book reveal the photographer’s impressive ability to combine his curiosity and empathy with the dignity and determination of those portrayed. “Sidelines is also a description of my own journey, showing the chain of decisions, as well as the slip-ups, missed opportunities and lazy choices. Sidelines is about what is left after deliberate choices to photograph or not to photograph have been made, and about what could not be photographed,“ Vink explains, before continuing. “The sidelines I see are found on the boundary between peace and chaos, between silence and noise, between safety and danger, between certainty and doubt. You’re playing or watching; you’re participating or not; you comply with different rules, depending on which side you’re on.“