Elisabeth Van Vyve (b.1957) has been documenting her social and physical environment with disposable cameras, Polaroids and various point-and-shoot 35 mm cameras for over thirty years. The obsessive nature of her photographic activity has resulted in an enormous collection of printed images, neatly kept in small photo albums and stored on every available shelf of her apartment and care home.
As a child, Elisabeth was diagnosed with various developmental disorders, including autism. Hearing difficulties affected her speech and made verbal interaction difficult. Communicating through means of drawings and basic text compositions soon became her preferred way of connecting with her environment. She also began taking photographs, apparently purely to satisfy her own curiosity and for her own enjoyment.
For many years, Elisabeth Van Vyve has been pointing her various cameras at the world around her, documenting that world in an extremely consistent and methodical way. The result is a vast body of work—literally thousands of snapshots. These have become a prism through which she sees the world, one through which we too might discover more about Elisabeth, as well as her work. Observations from the Margin presents a characteristic selection of photographs from her oeuvre.
A series of Elisabeth Van Vyve’s photographs has been included in the ABCD Art Brut Collection and will be part of the upcoming Photo/Brut travelling exhibition. The photographs and the book will be on display at various locations, including Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles, the Folk Art Museum in New York, and DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague.
