Charlotte Lybeer (1981, Belgium) studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Ghent and postgraduated at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Antwerp. In 2016 she received her PhD in visual arts (Lifestyle Supermarket) at the Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where she’s teaching photography.
Lybeer’s photography projects were widely exhibited nationally as well as abroad (Flemish Institute Osaka JP, De Kunsthal Rotterdam NL, Liefhertje en de Grote Witte Reus Den Haag NL, Three Shadows Photography Art Center Beijing CN, Flanders House New York USA,…) published in leading journals and magazines (Camera Austria, NRC handelsblad, Americansuburbx, Gup Magazine, Metropolis M, Capricious Magazine,…) and documented extensively through her website charlottelybeer.be.
In 2016 she made 2 books: “Epidermis II”, published by Art Paper Editions, Ghent and “Encyclopedia, Incomplete from A to Z”, a self-published book, where she confronts her own work with photography from the Dutch National Archive’s Spaarnestad collection.
Since 2003 Charlotte Lybeer photographs the experience of today’s living in a highly artificial world. Her early works focus on the staged and controlled environments of gated communities and theme parks. Recently she photographed people who define their identity through codes and masquerades, demonstrating membership of one group while distancing themselves from mainstream society.
Charlotte Lybeer photographs subcultures that are related to virtual three-dimensional worlds, where players construct online a second identity. The characteristic is that these trans-human identities also be adopted outside the virtual world. Those photographic projects visualizes how people respond to a changing world: a world that expand geographically but also increasingly imaginary. In those series she captures the isolation and stillness of her subjects, their escapist desire to become the character of a dream, shaped by film, virtual reality and games.
As a photographer Lybeer combines the curiosity of the journalist researching actual phenomena – symptoms of the global, capitalist crisis – the empathy of the detective infiltrating enclosed worlds, and the sensibility to capture the way fiction transforms reality.