Series

'Van Canneyt's photographs are about something that would not exist without the photograph.

They are bathed in twilight and shadow, sometimes in strong contrasts of light and dark. They show places that can be geographically located - she sometimes simply lists the countries where she travelled too - but that ultimately and above all exist in a world that is entirely hers, that exists only in her images. They depict events and situations that seem to have become detached from space and time for a very brief moment. One wonders whether she actually sees the image that way herself, at the moment of printing, or whether she rather senses it, that she anticipates its arrival. That she perceives that charge.

Van Canneyt's photos evoke comparisons with film (noir) and painting, but it pays to approach her work very consciously as photography - the medium she consciously chooses, after all -, especially with Wessel's quote in mind. It is not that her images are not painterly or cinematic (those references are certainly there, no doubt for her too) but they are paintings that do not exist, scenes from films that do not exist. Van Canneyt's images are not born of fantasy or fabrication, but are formed in an essential present; a brief but, for the photographer, intense present; an essential but fleeting and difficult to grasp.

Van Canneyt's photographs make you stop. They are unsettling in their quiet power, in their narrative, in their silent mystery. They are gripping. There is a calmness and a kind of wistfulness that, I suspect, exists only in the photographs; a nostalgia for a moment that we recognise, but was never there.' (...) Awakening takes us back to a vague present (or was it an unconfirmed future? The colour palette looks futuristic here and there), to somewhere between night and morning. Whoever is still awake then, whoever still moves then, does so as a phantom, a shadow not yet willing to reveal itself to the new day, not yet willing to yield to the delusion and reality of what is unmistakably coming. Those who are still awake here will stay forever in the indeterminate world and in the indeterminate moment in Van Canneyt's photographs - surely wanting to stay there. For what exists in her photographs exists only there.' - Stefan Vanthuyne

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