Edmond Sacré Portret van een stad - Gent Cultuurstad vzw ...

an ever-increasing number of tourists. As one of
the oldest sites in Ghent, the abbey was obviously
of interest to historians and the practitioners of
the emerging disciplines of art and architectural
history. Finally, it was a lieu de mémoire, a site
indelibly marked by some of the violence that had
erupted during the Belgian revolution.
The interest expressed by these different actors
translated into a range of publications, works of
art and manifestations often linked to the local
archaeological society, the Maatschappij van
Geschied- en Oudheidkunde te Gent, which Edmond
Sacré joined in 1894. If we consider the images
of St. Bavo’s produced in this milieu by people
like Armand Heins and the way they represented
the site, it becomes clear that these images did not
become ever more sharply focused, distinguishing
the picturesque from the historical, or the artistic
from the scientific, as did the different approaches
to the site.
For instance, the picturesque image is explicitly
recognized as an instrument shaping and stimulating
the historical imagination. Intentionally
or not, Edmond Sacré’s photos of the St. Bavo’s
Abbey dialogue with this visual tradition, which
gives further meaning to his use of particular
visual tropes.
STAIRCASES
AND PASSAGES
Steven Humblet
In the course of his career Edmond Sacré was
commissioned to photograph various interiors.
Through a close analysis of a few of these
pictures, both as an autonomous entity and as
part of a larger whole, this article seeks to shed
some light on the working methods of this urban
photographer when he was shooting indoors.
Two series in particular, one
dealing with the municipal charity the ‘Bureel van
Weldadigheid’, and another one dedicated to the
Small Beguinage, are the main focus of the article.
A careful reading of his formal and technical
choices (e.g. viewpoint, format, orientation) and
his use of elements of the interior (inner doors in
particular) should help the contemporary viewer
to understand how Sacré sees and envisions these
interior spaces. In both cases he seems intent on
transforming the photographed room into a space
in which the viewer himself can move. Moreover,
each image provides for a particular spatial experience
(e.g. limited and closed in the case of the
‘Bureel van Weldadigheid’, hurried and brimming
with life in the case of the Small Beguinage).
It is this specific manner of moving within the
room encouraged by each picture which more than
anything else leads us to a sense of the character
and function of the place. The interior space now
starts to reveal something of its nature: what it
means to function as a municipal institution in
the first case, what it means to live in a religious
community in the second.
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PORTRAITS
OF A CITY
Bruno Notteboom
This text focuses on photographic series by Sacré
that present views of Ghent outside the historic
centre: the outskirts of the city, the docks, the
Modern Village at the World Fair. Images of the
historic centre, notably by Armand Heins, have
been included within the framework of the World
Fair to present a more balanced history of the city.
Sacré’s work can be seen as a kaleidoscopic but
fragmented representation of the city, largely
dictated by the wishes and demands of a variety of
commissioners, authors and publishers.
The Sacré images have been drawn from the following
sources: L’Habitation ancienne en Belgique,
a sub-collection within the photo collection of the
Stedelijke Commissie der Monumenten en Stadsgezichten
(Municipal Commission for Monuments
and City Views), compiled by Armand Heins, Album
du Vieux Gand, a bulky album Heins compiled
together with Paul Bergmans on the occasion of
the World Fair, and the tour guides to the Modern
Village at the World Fair.
Much like the compilers of the above-mentioned
publications, Sacré invariably used juxtaposition
or sequencing of images to visualize the urban
environment, revealing the city as a kinetic space.
He essentially constructs his story visually: the
story of how the urban environment presents itself
to a viewer in motion in a sequence of consecutive
angles. But he makes no explicit statements about
the city: the photographic image itself does not say
what the city should be growing into and expresses
no regret about what has disappeared (or is disappearing).
That changes, however, as soon as the
image is placed within the context of a publication.
The albums and guides examined apparently intended
to give the past a place amidst the violent
innovations of the World Fair. Yet Sacré apparently
also struggled with the changing urban environment
in some sequences of images, especially in
those showing Ghent docks.