In 2020, Mark De Fraeye donated his photographic archive to the King Baudouin Foundation, which is committed to safeguarding and preserving it, while AKG-IMAGES Berlin stored the physical archive and made it accessible to the public. “Witness of Time,” from which the images shown here were also selected, is an open project targeted at various museums and host institutions within and outside of Europe.
Silvester
It aims to establish a dialogue with different collections in different contexts, creating a conceptual framework that invites interpretation and reflection. Through poetry, imagination, engagement, and confrontation, it challenges viewers to engage and to question themselves. What am I doing here? What am I seeing? And what are these oft-random, whispering images and displaced, silent objects trying to tell me? "Witness of Time", is the synthesis of 50 years of photography.
The photographer Mark De Fraeye (b. 1949) was a professor of photography at the Sint-Lucas Hogeschool voor Kunst en Design in Antwerp, Belgium, for many years. Over time he specialized in visual anthropology, although he constantly sought new expressive opportunities for photography in his artistic work. At the same time, he continues to ask fundamental questions about the medium itself, exploring diverse themes such as the interaction between image and memory, the encapsulation of temporal experience, and the dichotomy of abstraction and tangible reality. For more than thirty years, Mark De Fraeye has travelled the world, at first primarily in Southeast Asia, later in Central Asia, and in recent years in Latin America.
