Coming
to the camera from a background in architecture and design, Willy Kessels
maintained his early interest in relationships of space and light. This leading
Belgian photographer of the interwar years immediately started experimenting
with techniques then popular with avant-garde European photographers, using
unexpected vantage points and making photomontages and photograms.

In 1932
and 1933, Kessels displayed his work at the prestigious International
Exhibition of Photography, an important forum for modernist photography in
Belgium, held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The cover of the 1932
catalogue featured this image, an angular self-portrait theatrically lit from
behind. Kessels’s profiled silhouette turns the artist into a sort of
propeller, emphasizing the energy of his body caught midaction.