Margins of Excess

Margins of Excess catches the moment personal imagination collides with what a society is willing to believe. That collision is the real subject of the post-truth era here, not a footnote to it.

Pinckers made the book with writer and researcher Victoria Gonzalez-Figueras. Together they tracked six people across the United States who had been reported in local and national media as hoaxers or con artists after pursuing outsized personal dreams. The book intercuts newly staged photographs with reprinted news articles, archival footage stills, and transcribed interviews. Each story arrives already contested: the reader gets the same mix of fact, spin, and self-mythology the original coverage produced, with no editorial voice sorting one from the other. Hans Theys' introductory essay situates the project within Pinckers' longer interest in how photographic truth gets constructed. Self-published under his own De Bedoeling imprint in 2018.

Pinckers (b. 1988, Belgium) trained at KASK Ghent and the Royal College of Art, and now teaches at KASK. His practice keeps testing where documentary authority breaks down under staging. Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014), made in South Korea with Quinten De Bruyn, tested it one way; Red Ink (2018), on North Korean framings of the Korean War, tested it another. Margins of Excess extends that line to the American media landscape.