News photographer, professor, activist and feminist, Véronique Verchevalis, by her own admission, a perfect blend of her parents, Jeanne Vervoort,
feminist and writer, and Georges Vercheval, photographer, founder and for many
years director of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi. She was only 16 when
she started photography classes, along with her studies in social sciences. A
graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Charleroi, she began her career in 1979
as a photojournalist for the magazine Voyelles, where she made numerous reports
on the status of women in Belgium (at home, at work, creative women or
political).
In 1983, together with her mother, Bernard Bay and Jean-Luc Deru, she
founded the Archives de Wallonie, an association of French-speaking
photographers, journalists, historians and sociologists committed to
safeguarding the traces of human action. In this context, she participated in
photographic missions in the world of work in Wallonia with the aim of
constituting a collective memory essentially linked to companies, industries
and social movements: Les
Sidérurgistes (1984), Le Roton, dernier charbonnage de Wallonie (1985), l’Agriculture ou l’histoire photographiée des gens de la terre
(1988), or La révolution alimentaire à l’aube du marché européen (1992).
Since 1990, she pursued a career as a freelance photographer and made
news reports in Belgium and abroad in the social and cultural sectors. Among
the major reports she has produced: Demandeurs d’Asile (1995), a report on the hosting of refugees; Les images libèrent la tête (1997), a series of photos made with the inmates of the prison of
Lantin; Les travailleurs de la
santé (1998),
a portrait of doctors, nurses and physical therapists in their daily
activities, questioning our existence and the fate of our bodies; La route à tout prix (2001), a report on the daily life of truck drivers; Palestine. Carnets de notes (2002), on the daily life of Palestinians with and despite the
Israeli occupation; or Usine occupée (2008), on the workers of the Royal
Boch factory before its liquidation. Alongside these reports, Véronique
Vercheval regularly works with theatre and dance companies such as the Théâtre
du Manège in Maubeuge, Charleroi
/Danses and Plan K. Since
1987, she has been teaching photography at the Institute of Arts and Crafts of
La Louvière. She exhibits in Wallonia and Brussels, but also in the
Netherlands, Italy and France.
Working exclusively in the format of the
series, which are the fruit of a long immersion work within a community or a
particular subject, Véronique Vercheval's approach takes on a form of
testimony. Far from a purely aesthetic research and refusing any event-oriented
or sensationalist approach to the profession of photographer, she likes to go
out to meet people and make them "talk through the photographs". When
in April 2002 she participated in the mission 100 artists of Palestine, initiated by the Director of the Ashter Theater in Ramallah, she was
surprised by what the media did not show: a market organised amongst the
rubble, women and their children at the ice-cream parlour, smiling young girls
having fun together at their Summer camp ... Véronique Vercheval's approach
does not seek visual shock. Her photographs never feature death or physical
violence. Far from the media clichés known to the general public, they are
surprising because they show what we’re not used to seeing: smiling people,
women and children in their daily activities, and not terrorists. Using black
and white almost exclusively, she chooses to focus on the essentials her
photographs show.
