Lara Mennes

Lara Mennes (1982, BE) studied Photography at Sint-Lukas Brussels, History of Art & Archaeology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. In 2009 she won the Young Belgian Painters Award for her work Cité.

In her photographs Mennes looks for a past that is still discernible in architecture through social history and personal stories. Her quest leads her to run-down buildings and working-class districts, where amidst the harsh reality of today she looks for fragments of the past, which are sometimes poetic and sometimes as harsh as their surroundings. But what all these fragments have in common is that they have largely been forgotten by the parties concerned and are captured by Mennes before they disappear forever.