Herman Selleslags 
Life Will Give You Pictures

  • Belgium
  • fr
  • en
  • 73'
Herman Selleslags | Life Will Give You Pictures
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Synopsis

Herman Selleslags, like many great photographers, has amassed thousands of iconic photographs while remaining discreet. The man who readily quotes Cartier-Bresson’s phrase, “You just have to live, and life will give you pictures,” has indeed lived. And life certainly gave him pictures, and not just any pictures. Images of Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so many others whom he managed to capture. Nearly 70 years of musical and popular history on silver gelatin paper and contact sheets. But time passes, and it is at this moment, as he looks back on his life, that the director films him, as he and his son take inventory of his past before selling his house. In this way, Herman Selleslags evokes thousands of images and three generations of photographers. Together with his son Jan, himself a photographer, Herman discovers the photographic archives of Rik Selleslags, his father, in the drawers.. Family life was not simple, and Cartier-Bresson’s phrase can be turned around: for it was also the images that shaped Selleslags’s life.

What you will find in this film

The photographic archives • the music press in the 1960s • iconic portraits of artists • three generations of photographers

Keywords

Photographic memory History of Photography Masters of Photography Analogue Photography Portrait & Aesthetics
Every story can be interpreted differently. And every story needs a good liar.
For me, quality isn’t a priority; the present moment is a priority.
I love coincidences.
The ‘decisive moment’ is the photograph itself.

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The authors/artists

Aldine Reinink
Aldine Reinink
Film Director
Herman Selleslags
Herman Selleslags
Photographer

Further exploration

Bibliography

Resources

Instagram

Herman Selleslags, Arnon Grunberg, Ludo Helsen, Piet Piryns – Herman Selleslags: Archief 07, FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen, 2007. (Dutch) – The most important book directly connected to Selleslags’s work and archive; especially valuable for its photographic material.  

Herman Selleslags – Foto’s / Photos, Masereelfonds, 1982. (Dutch) – A scarce early monograph that shows Selleslags before the museum archive, through portraits, cultural figures and documentary images.  

Tamara Berghmans ed. – Photobook Belge: 1854–Now, Hannibal Books / FOMU, 2019. (English) – A major overview of Belgian photobooks, useful for situating Selleslags within a wider Belgian photographic publishing history.  

Gail Buckland – Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955–Present, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. (English) – A key international reference on how photographers shaped the visual mythology of rock and popular music.  

Kristen Lubben ed. – Magnum Contact Sheets, Thames & Hudson, 2011. (English) – Not about Selleslags directly, but highly relevant to the film’s attention to contact sheets, editing, memory and the hidden life of an archive. 

Herman Selleslags & the FOMU collection – FOMU – longread. The most relevant free English text on Selleslags’s archive, his fifty years with Humo, and the acquisition of the Rik and Herman Selleslags collections by FOMU.

Project Tegenlicht: New techniques for the preservation of photo archives – FOMU – article. A strong companion piece to the film’s archival dimension, focused on the material vulnerability of negatives, prints and photographic collections.  

PROOF: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet – Cleveland Museum of Art – exhibition essay. A useful reference for understanding contact sheets as tools of selection, memory and photographic thought. 

The Photographic Record – MoMA – reference essay. A concise institutional text on how photographic archives are re-read, reinterpreted and turned into new narratives over time.  

How Archives Illuminate the History and Culture of Ghana – Aperture – essay. Though geographically distant from Belgium, this essay offers a strong reflection on how archives connect private memory, public history and cultural identity.