Max Pinckers (born 1988) is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels.
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He has self-published the books The Fourth Wall (2012); Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014), which won a Photographic Museum of Humanity grant); and Red Ink (2018), which won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Pinckers has also won the Edward Steichen Award Laureate.
Pinckers was born in 1988 in Brussels, Belgium. He gained a BA (2008–2010) and a MFA (2010–2012) in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium. From 2015 to 2017 he was a nominee member of Magnum Photos before leaving the agency.
His work often takes the position of challenging preconceptions of documentation and is intended to instill skepticism in the viewer. In an interview about his collaborative artwork Trophy Camera, he said, "We all are still made to feel that we are in control somehow of the image-making process, but this is something that's very much diminishing."
Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, has described the format of Pinckers' second book, Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014) as "sitting between conceptual and documentary, while upending expectations of each" as it "mixes documentary photography with staged scenes reminiscent of Bollywood movies." O'Hagan summarised the book's subject matter as "central to this rich visual narrative is a series of photographs of a four-man activist organisation called the Love Commandos. Based in Delhi, they operate on a shoestring from their small, cluttered office, manning a telephone helpline and website to provide advice and support – including safe rooms and shelters across India – for runaway couples who have fallen in love across the boundaries of caste or religion. The commandos have even sent out teams to rescue young people at risk of violence."
Pinckers' work is held in the following public collections:
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| Artists | |
