Lotus

Lotus is a young photographer's first attempt to turn the documentary picture against its own premise of neutrality. The project, built around Thailand's kathoey community, argues that every 'objective' photograph is already staged.

Working with Quinten De Bruyn, Pinckers photographed transgender sitters under visible tripods and theatrical lighting, crew and equipment left in frame rather than hidden. Subjects were also given disposable cameras, folding their own pictures into the book. The sitters' gender ambiguity becomes a metaphor for the instability of the documentary image itself, caught between what it records and what its maker has arranged.

Pinckers (b. 1988) built on this early project through The Fourth Wall and Margins of Excess, and won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2018. He co-founded Lyre Press, which published this hardcover edition of 3,000 in 2016, with an essay by Hans Theys and design by Manuel Zenner. De Bruyn, credited as Pinckers' collaborator on this KASK graduation-era project, is known separately as a Ghent-based illustrator.