Margins of Excess

Max Pinckers

Max Pinckers’s multiple-award-winning photographic series Margins of Excess examines the difficulty in differentiating between reality and fiction in the modern media age. The work inquires into terms such as ‘credibility’ and ‘illusion’ in times of fake news and manufactured narratives.

The focus here is on the fates of six people who, due to their fantastic stories, briefly enjoyed national attention in the US press because of their attempts to realize a dream or passion but were presented as frauds or deceivers by the media’s apparent incapacity to deal with idiosyncratic versions of reality. The work asks to what extent terms such as ‘truth’, ‘half-truth’, ‘lie’, ‘fiction’, and ‘entertainment’ are related in a post-factual era. The photographs are accompanied by newspaper articles, archival material, and personal interviews.

Max Pinckers lives and works in Brussels. His work is shown internationally and has already received numerous awards, including the Edward Steichen Award (2015) and the Leica Oscar Barnack Award (2018).