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• Issue #276
• Article

By Michael Diemar

Xavier Canonne. ©Clémence Justet Termier, ENS Louis Lumière.

Belgium has two national museums of photography, FOMU, the Photo Museum Antwerp, in the Flemish-speaking part of the country and Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi in the French-speaking part. Unlike Antwerp, Charleroi is somewhat off the beaten track, but the Musée de la Photographie nevertheless has a strong profile in the international photography world, thanks to its innovative, often surprising exhibition program and the leadership of Xavier Canonne, one of the world's leading authorities on Surrealism. In the Fall of 2024 through January 2025, to mark the centenary of the publication of the first Surrealist manifesto, the museum showed "Surrealisme, pour ainsi dire (Surrealism, so to speak)", featuring a selection of works from the museum's collection.

The museum recently showed four other exhibitions, including one on Studio Stone, the photographic partnership of the Belgian Wilhelmine Camille Honorine Schammelhout, aka Cami Stone, and the Russian Aleksander Serge Steinsapir, aka Sasha Stone. They met in Berlin, where they founded a studio in 1924.

"It's a very interesting exhibition, with some very rare material.

Jean-Marc Wull. From the series Portraits Retrouvé, © Arthuro Gaëtan © Jean-Marc Wull.

"The other main exhibition was with Jean-Marc Wull, a French photographer based in Brussels. It's about a box of negative films he found in a public dumpster in Guatemala. He decided to identify the people in the photographs. They came from a photo studio in a village close to the border with El Salvador. After enquiries, he found out the name of one of the people in the negatives, and through that he also found out the name of the village photographer. After that, he went to the village, and made friends with all the people. It's a magical story, a detective story.

"We are also exhibiting Lucie Pastureau, a French photographer, who lives in the North of France. And we are presenting a short movie by Pablo Briones, an Argentine movie maker, who lives in Switzerland. So there's a lot going on, as always!"

That sort of intensity in the program. Is that something you strive for?

"Yes, because the museum building offers the possibility to show different things. We are located in a former Carmelite convent from the 19th century, and we use the large chapel for the main exhibition, but there are other rooms in different sizes, which means we can show different kinds of work. There are different audiences for photography. Some come for the historical presentations. Others are looking for young, contemporary artists. We can offer a large choice to the public, have a mix of historical photography with well-known names, but also discoveries."

You have put your own stamp on the museum, so I'd like to take you back a bit. When did you first become interested in art?

"I have been interested in arts, at least since I was 13 or 14 years old. It was probably because my father was a public librarian. I had the opportunity to read a lot of books for free, because books came to our home first and then went to the public library. I should mention that I was not a very good student. Reading books and visiting museums were a kind of refuge for me, but I never thought of it as a future job. I was painting and drawing a little bit. That's probably what turned me on to painters, but I really didn't imagine that it would lead to art studies."

You're one of the world's leading authorities on Surrealism. When did that interest emerge?

"It came early! When I was 13 years old, my parents took me to a group exhibition of the purchases made by the Belgian state. Most of the works didn't interest me much but among them were works by Marcel Mariën. I had never heard of him and I was very shocked because the works were so funny! He had put objects such as spoons, napkins and other items on images of Mondrian paintings and repainted them. They really made me laugh. I remember coming home at night, repeating his process. The thought that I would later become a friend of his never entered my mind.

"The second step came when I was a little bit older, 17 years old. I was reading some texts by a young Belgian Surrealist poet, Fernand Dumont, who died at the age of 39 in Bergen Belsen. At the time, nobody knew much about the books he had printed, even less about his unpublished texts. I decided to research him. I contacted his widow, who was living in the South of France, and she pointed me in the direction of some of the surrealists who had known him. That's how I met Armand Simon, Marcel Mariën, and others in the group. They were very kind to me. At that time, in '77-'78, there weren't many people who were interested in Surrealism. We became friends and I started collaborating with them. I made some drawings and collages for their publication and I also made a book with Marcel Mariën. He wrote the text after some collages I had made. In 1986, I started a little publishing house with books printed in 200 or 300 copies. I was involved with this little group, surrealists who were old but still active."

Was it at that point that you decided to pursue a career in art?

"I didn't know what I wanted to do. As I told you, I was a bad student. The last summer before secondary school, I decided I wanted to travel, to be a sailor, but I wasn't really ready for that. My father said, "Why don't you try studying the history of art?" If it didn't work, I could always leave. I was very surprised that the first year at the university in Brussels went so well. It was probably because I was on my own, and could study in my own rhythm. I was pursuing my personal interests, with no specific career plans, certainly not to be a curator or to be in charge of a museum. Anyway, I continued my art studies and got my PhD at the Sorbonne in 2002."

Following your studies, how did you career evolve?

"I had the opportunity to work for a travel company for six or seven years alongside my studies. I was a tour leader and I worked in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, all those countries that are so rich in archeology. I also led groups to the Soviet Union. It was a nice job, well paid, and it was interesting. Anyway, the father of a close friend of mine was the director of a collection belonging to a province in Belgium. He wanted to retire, and said to me, "Why don't you apply for my position? I will help you!" Well, I became director of the collection. We didn't have a museum, but we organized various activities and exhibitions. It became a museum when I left in 2000, and that was when I took up my position as the director of this museum."

Let's turn to the Musée de la Photographie. When and how was it founded? I believe there was some sort of private initiative to get it going.

"The museum opened in spring of '87, but the idea had risen earlier from a group of photographers who wanted to create a kind of archive center. The industrial landscape in Charleroi was disappearing. A lot of archives, photos, documents appeared to be destined for the trash. They also wanted to document the changing landscape around the city. This group of photographers worked around this idea, and the city of Charleroi lent them a little house in the heart of the city. That was the beginning of the museum with Georges Vercheval, as founder and director. The government of the French Community of Belgium decided to help, and they found out that this old convent building was disused. It was in very bad shape but gradually, it was refurbished and transformed into a museum."

There are two cultural departments in Belgium, divided according to language, Flemish in the North, French in the South. In addition to your museum, there's FOMU, the Photo Museum Antwerp, in the Flemish--speaking part. Do they have the same remit in terms of preserving and exhibiting the country's heritage?

"We have pretty much the same goals, the preservation of photography, the study and the presentation of photography, but there are differences of course. Every museum director has his or her own mind as to what to exhibit. The museum in Antwerp has temporary exhibitions, as we have here, but in the last 10 years they have decided to show less and less of their collection. We have another policy. Half of the space in the museum is dedicated to the permanent collection and the other half to temporary exhibitions."

What collections does the museum hold?

"The collection has around 100,000 prints and roughly 1.5 million negatives, glass and celluloid. A museum collection is never complete, but we can cover the story of the photography from its earliest days to the present. We have mostly Belgian and French photographers, but we also have works by a lot of photographers from other countries, America, Italy, and so forth."

The division between languages in Belgium. Does that ever pose problems. Where it's not so clear cut which language part a certain photographer and his or her work belongs to?

René Magritte. Le modèle rouge, oil on canvas, 1953, Collection BNP Paribas Fortis © Succession René Magritte - SABAM Belgium, 2025. Magritte. La Ligne de vie, curated by Xavier Canonne, is on show at KMSKA (Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp) until February 22, 2026.

"I must tell you that I never really feel this with the artists themselves. This separation is rather a political issue. I have shown a lot of exhibitions with Dutch-speaking photographers, and we have many of them in our collection as well. We have good relationships with institutions and archives all over Belgium. For example, the Studio Stone exhibition is coproduced with Amsab-ISG (Institute of Social History) in Ghent, a Dutch-speaking city and they have many, many interesting archives.

"As for myself, I've prepared an exhibition about René Magritte that opened last November and runs until February 26th. It is exhibited at the Fine Arts Museum in Antwerp. I took the decision when I came here 25 years ago, to have all the texts in the museum translated to French, Dutch and English so there is no separation here, unlike the political world."

How does the political world affect your museum?

"The budget that the Dutch-speaking government allocates to their cultural institutions is bigger than the French-speaking government; and it's probably because their language is a minority language, so they feel they have to defend their own culture, not only in art and photography but also in dance, film, literature etc."

You took up your post at the museum in 2000. What changes did you make?

"I made an analysis as soon as I started, and it made clear that we had the three good foundations, the collection, the permanent presentation, the temporary exhibitions and the educational service; but there was a lack of space. There was no cafeteria, not enough toilets, no shop and the public library wasn't very good. There was also too little space for contemporary work because the sizes of photographs increased drastically by the end of the '90s. It was absolutely necessary to extend the museum.

"We entered into discussions with the EU and the government of the French-speaking community to get funds to build a new wing. Fortunately, we were successful. We doubled the size the museum from 3000 square meters, to 6000. Building works started in 2006, and in 2008 we had the grand opening. It also enabled us to open the large garden at the back of the museum to the public. In addition, we doubled the number of staff, from 18 people to 36. The expansion continues. We are currently refurbishing the old attic, adding insulation and creating new offices, enabling us to use the current office space for storage in the future."

How has the collection grown during your tenure as director?

"The previous director was luckier than I am because the prices for photography were much lower back then. He could buy 10 times more than I can. My budget is nowhere enough. In earlier days, people would donate photographs because it was thought to be of little value. These days, the internet has made it easy to check prices. Sometimes people change their minds and want to sell instead.

"We can't buy what we feel we need. There are some big holes in the collection. For example, we don't have a great Man Ray print. It would cost around 200,000 euros—money we don't have. Likewise, I would like a print from Sugimoto's series of movie theaters. That would cost around 60,000 euros. That's my entire yearly budget for buying photographs. It is not enough, so I have to find money from other sources, private or corporate donations."

What's the situation for you currently in terms of corporate and private donations. Are they more willing to give, or is it drying up?

"Last year, Delen Bank stepped in to help us. Others are providing services for free to help us. It can be difficult to convince people and companies that supporting a museum is a good thing when jobs are being lost and workers are demonstrating in the streets for better pay. Another thing that makes it difficult for us is that Charleroi is not one of the main cities in Belgium. It's a former industrial city, with not the best of reputations, and that can make it difficult to attract corporate sponsors."

When I talk to museum curators in other countries, they tell me that they get a fair amount of offers of taking on whole archives, not from the most famous photographers, but very good photographers. Most of the time they turn them down as they don't have the space or the resources to take care of those archives. What's the situation like in Belgium, and for your museum?

Sasha Stone. S.K.F. ball bearings, 1924-1929. Vintage gelatin silver print. Coll. Amsab-IHS fo028512.

"It's exactly the same. There is now a generation of photographers who worked in analog photography, and if they have passed on, the widow, husband or children want their legacy preserved. The problem for us is that we have no more space. I created two additional storage spaces when we expanded the museum and they are full now. I will have a meeting with the new minister in April. Solutions must be found, throughout the sector because I know that the Fine Art Museum in Antwerp has the same problem. The government has to give us the funding to preserve the heritage, because I cannot keep saying to people who offer us archives, "Sorry, I have no space."

"Our mission is to protect the heritage. If they don't provide the funds, I will have to rent some space from an art transport company, which would cost around 20,000 euros a year and would not be ideal in any case."

You have presented some remarkable exhibitions over the years. And they're often unexpected, like Roman Photo, a show on photo novels. I can think of quite a few museums who wouldn't contemplate something like that even for a second. Do you have favorites?

"Roman Photo was fun to put together because it was so far removed from classic photography, from the photographic canon. I used to say that I love the last exhibition or the current one the most. I thoroughly enjoyed the shows I did on René Magritte, Man Ray and the other surrealists. But there are some exhibitions that help you realize that there are many things you don't know.

“Twenty years ago, I made an exhibition about photography in Argentina, and I went there to investigate further and learnt so very much. Doing an exhibition with a photographer is a kind of short love story. I say short because we will see each other a lot during a very short time. We have to be creative and find a way. An exhibition needs to be confident, and I will never show an exhibition of a photographer I don't believe in. They don't have to be photographs I would hang at home but the work has to be strong and original."

You also have a permanent exhibition. How is it mapped out, and the periods, themes, the material and so forth?

"The permanent collection is shown in two wings in different parts of the building, the new one and the oldest one. In the oldest part we have a chronological presentation of the collection. It's not a classical presentation, with displays of French photography, German photography, American photography, Belgian photography. Photography is a collective invention, involving many countries. We decided to show photography in the 19th century as a collective invention and to show the uses of photography. As soon as photography had been created, what happened? People wanted to have their own face, their own picture, their own identity, but they also wanted to travel and take photos of Egypt, of Greece, of Italy, everywhere, to be like the painters who make the Grand Tour. There was scientific photography. And in the years 1850s and '60s, there was war photography, in the Crimea and then the Civil War in United States. We follow the development of Pictorialism in the 19th century, which is the first aesthetic movement in photography. We then explore social documentary and the avant-garde movement in photography, where photography decided to have its own point of view.

"The presentation in the contemporary wing is more thematic. We mix older photography with new photography, to show links between photographs across time. Starting in the 1980s, photography entered in the field of other the arts, painting, sculpture, movies; and we show photography in the widest sense possible, showing anonymous photographers, next to very famous photographers. It's a kind of confrontation."

Art institutions on both sides of the Atlantic have had their budgets slashed. Has your museum been affected?

"Right now, we don't really know. The last election resulted in a new government. It's not extremely right wing, but right wing nonetheless. There have been big demonstrations because people are angry about the cuts in the culture and education sectors. This past year, our budget stayed the same, but we are still waiting to see what's going to happen, and I fear what it will bring."

You mentioned the Magritte painting exhibition. Do you have other shows planned outside the museum?

"The Magritte exhibition is something I do at home at night. I'm a kind of independent curator for Surrealism. Last year I curated the big centenary exhibition about Surrealism in Brussels. It took me three years to put it together. It's actually getting more difficult to put those big shows together. The costs for transportation and insurance costs keep going up. Another project I have planned is a book about the various places in Brussels where Magritte lived."

Cover of Marcel Mariën – Le Passager Clandestin, published in 2003.

Finally, I would like to backtrack to Marcel Mariën. I don't know if it's true or not but one story has it that he forged Magritte paintings at some stage.

"No, but he was selling fakes made by Magritte. During WWII and the Nazi occupation, it was difficult to get hold of paper, just like it was with food. There was paper on the black market, but it was extremely expensive. Magritte and his friends had to find a solution to keep printing books. With the black market, a lot of people needed to launder their money. There wasn't that much expertise in art so Magritte decided to make fakes. He made fake Picassos, fake Braques, fake Max Ernsts; and Marcel Mariën sold them.

“Years later, there was an exhibition near Gothenburg in Sweden. Max Ernst and Magritte were together at the opening. Magritte showed Ernst an Ernst painting he had forged and said, "Let me tell you a funny story Max. I'm the author of this fake!". Ernst looked at the painting, and said, "Not bad! Congratulations!" And then he signed it! But I should also say that Marcel Mariën sometimes handed out certificates for paintings and drawings by "Magritte". Fakes that were probably made by one of his friends, but he couldn't make such forgeries himself. He wasn't a painter."

What was he like as a person?

"He was a very interesting man, but also a very closed and very strange man. He was an artist, but at the same time, he wasn't an artist. He had a point of view about art, about society, which was something different. I never spent a whole day with him that he wasn't quick to get annoyed. It was like that all the time with him. But the collaboration with him, and at such an early age was a great experience."

Marcel Mariën. Muette et aveugle, me voici habillée des pensées que tu me prêtes, ca 1940-1945. Coll. Communauté française de Belgique, dépôt au Musée de la Photographie 18 414. © Fondation Marcel Mariën / SABAM Belgium 2024.

He did some photography in his early years, and then returned to it in the 1980s.

"Early on, he used a little camera to make some images, to photograph his ideas, making compositions. He wasn't really a photographer as such. He made images from 1943 until 1950 but he didn't exhibit them at the time.

"He came back to photography in 1983 because he had just bought his little house, the only house he could afford to buy, because he was a poor man for many years. He was always struggling financially. In his little house, there was enough room for a studio, and he sent negatives to be printed at a lab. He also reused some negatives from his early years.

"The chapter of Marcel Mariën is very important in the history of surrealism. He died in 1993. I did a big show here at the museum to mark the 20th anniversary of his death, with a big monograph. I chose Marcel Mariën: Le Passager Clandestin (Marcel Mariën: The Stowaway) as the title. I think the title said a lot about him. I regard myself as incredibly lucky to have met, known and worked with him.”

Michael Diemar is editor-in-chief of The Classic, a print and digital magazine about classic photography. In August 2025, he cofounded Vintage Photo Fairs Europe, an organization focused on promoting independent tabletop fairs in Europe and spreading knowledge about classic photography in general. He is a long-time writer about the photography scene, writing extensively for several Scandinavian photography publications, as well as for the E-Photo Newsletter and I Photo Central.