Max Pinckers (1988, BE) grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia and Singapore, and is currently based in Brussels, where he was born. His work challenges the conventions of documentary photography by exploring theatricality, performativity and collaboration, made visible through the explicit use of cinematic lighting and staging in a documentary context. Photography, for Pinckers, is a speculative gesture that involves more than the mere representation of external realities. His approach to reality and truth is plural, and open to articulation in different ways.

Like the external world that it claims to represent, the documentary image is inherently unstable, dependent on context and the customary visual language of realism. Pinckers’ work draws on contemporary and historical debates, merging fact, fiction and imagination to reflect on the ways that our shared realisms are defined and represented through photographs. It treats documentary as a hybrid practice involving not just images, but objects, performances, texts, found footage and sculptural interventions that investigate the complex nature of representation. Collaboration is essential to Pinckers’ practice, creating a space for the exchange of ideas between himself and the people he works with, and for the critical examination of his own position as a photographer. Ultimately, Pinckers’ self-reflexive work sets out to question both documentary discourse and artistic practice—to create other modes of documentary that foreground the deceptive nature of images yet always emotionally and empathically engage with people and their stories.

His work takes shape as self-published artist books and exhibition installations such as The Fourth Wall (2012), Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014), Margins of Excess (2018) and State of Emergency (2024). He is co-founder of the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary. Pinckers is a Doctor in the Arts and a guest lecturer at the School of Arts/KASK in Ghent, and is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp and Tristan Lund in London.

Amongst awards received by Pinckers are the Special Mention Prize of the Photo-Texte Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles in 2024, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2018, the Edward Steichen Award in 2015, finalist in the Young Belgian Art Prize in 2014, the ArtContest M. Hans Vossen Prize in 2014, the Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant in 2014, an Honourable Mention in the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2014, the City of Levallois Photography Award in 2013, the Horlait-Dapsens Prize in 2012, and the Musée de la Photographie Charleroi Le Soir Prize in 2010.

His solo-exhibitions include Double Bind at FOMU Antwerp, State of Emergency at Palazzo Madama in Torino, Red Ink at the Boroomsan Museum, Margins of Excess at Belfast Exposed, and Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty at BOZAR in Brussels, among others. Since 2008 he has participated in over 130 group exhibitions, including Give and Take. Bilder über Bilder at Hamburger Kunsthalle, How to Win at Photography – Image-Making as Play at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Not Standing Still: New Approaches in Documentary Photography at Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne, The Lives and Loves of Images at the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie in Mannheim, Picture This at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sleight of Hand at the Lishui Art Museum, Coming People at SMAK in Ghent, and Magnum – New Blood at Milk Gallery in New York.