Stephan Vanfleteren

[4] In this role, he covered, in black and white, stories of the 1990s such as the death of King Baudouin, the protests over the Clabecq ironworks [Wikidata], the Kosovo War, the Rwandan genocide, and the Dutroux affair.

They photographed each other, "in identical white jumpsuits, mirror shades and high-rise hair",[13] as "Elvis" (Huber) and "Presley" (Vanfleteren), in humdrum scenes from Times Square to Death Valley.

A review in Het Nieuwsblad of an exhibition of his portraits commented that Vanfleteren's proximity to the faces and the detail of the photographs together almost create "death masks of the living".

[2]: 205 In the same year, at Wintercircus Mahy [Wikidata], Ghent, Vanfleteren exhibited Portret 1989–2009, around two hundred portraits in black and white of people who had had some media presence during the previous two decades.

Series of portraits – one could call them mugs – of persons bearing the scars of their hard lives, landscapes engulfed in mist, a document of the repetitive days of an internee at the Guislain Institute in Ghent and finally an un-embellished portrayal of Theofiel, an old farmer broken down amid a pile of objects.

[18][n 2]Vanfleteren was the fifth (after Bernard Plossu, Dave Anderson, Jens Olof Lasthein and Claire Chevrier) in a series of photographers to be provided with a residency at the Museum of Photography [Wikidata] in Charleroi.

[21][n 3] A review in Moustique said: Alone, free as a dog, sidling between fog and neon lights, in streets where memories of once flourishing industry disintegrate, or contemplating from the top of a slag heap a landscape where factories once spewed smoke, it is above all all the decay of the world that he encounters.

However, in 2013 he published a series of colour photographs, taken several years earlier, of old wall advertisements, facades destined for demolition or abandoned shop windows; these appeared in a lavishly produced book, Façades & Vitrines.