About the photographer Barbara Iweins is a Belgian photographer who has started her artistic career in Amsterdam where she has lived for a number of years. A collector since a tender age, Barbara continues to classify, and gather and archive her photographic subjects according to strict criteria.

Fascinated by the vulnerability of humans, she passes her time to push the boundaries of what is intimate. Her series “Au coin de ma rue” where she entered bit by bit in the private life of strangers. Or her project 7AM/7PM where she invited these same strangers to sleep at her house to capture the innocence and fragility just as they wake up. Her series “Bath” where she captured the moments of quiet solitude characterize her quest for innocence and the beauty in imperfection. Since her return to Brussels, she has retreated into her own world where she lives like a hermit working on her new project KATALOG. It’s the first time she uses her private life as a case study.

Copyright © 2022 Barbara Iweins

Without the following partner, I would have died of exhaustion:

Avec l'aide de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles

[ English ]

As a neurotic collector, collecting, ordering, categorizing and exhibiting things have always given me immense pleasure. I think that I am mainly looking for an aesthetic emotion in the assemblage of things (or ideas) that at first glance might seem incongruous or even tasteless.

I’d like to keep things as they are, but my adult life decided otherwise. After many moves and a sudden divorce in 2015, I left Amsterdam and came back to live in Brussels with my three children under my arm.

Longing for more stability in my life, I felt the urge to really lock myself into my new place. I decided then and there to push the limits of my inertia and neuroticism by getting up close and personal with my belongings and analyze all of them in detail.

From then on, for four years, room by room, drawer by drawer, I photographed, indexed and classified my enti