JTF (just the facts): Published in 2025 by Witty Books (here). Softcover, 24×29 cm, 72 pages (with 4 double fold out spreads), with 31 black-and-white images (plus additional detail enlargements). Includes a short explanatory essay. Design by Ilaria Miotto. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: Artistic residencies and commissions are a surprisingly prestigious resume builder for artists at all stages of their careers. For many, it’s a familiar pattern – being invited to come to a foreign city or a gorgeously secluded place, to stay for a few weeks or even months with all expenses paid (perhaps with other artists in residence to enhance the collective creative spirit and cross disciplinary interchange), and to be encouraged to make work in this new place without constraints or preconceived notions. Some artists seem to move from residency to residency like itinerant travelers, while others take part in such activities only infrequently, perhaps as an artistic palate cleanser or in the hopes of a potential spark coming from the unexpected context and experience. The challenge of such projects is of course for the artist to conceptually relocate him or herself in this new place and to use that unfamiliarity and freedom as a catalyst for fresh thinking that leads somewhere worthwhile, rather than simply to the absentminded fiddlings of a vacation.

Back in the fall of 2020, in the height of the pandemic lockdowns, Max Pinckers was invited to come to Rome. The commission came from the Capital of Rome, with the idea that Pinckers would make work in the city, the resulting photographs then joining the permanent collection of the Collezione Roma. At the time, such an invitation likely felt like both a very welcome escape (from wherever the Belgian photographer was sheltering in place) and a decently tough artistic problem to crack – with the famous city emptied of the bustle of its residents, how could he tap into its unique rhythms and personality?

While Pinckers has of course made work in his hometown of Brussels, he has largely located his projects in more distant locales, perhaps making the idea of this Roman assignment more workable. We’ve tracked a handful of Pinckers’s photobook projects over the past decade, following him to Kenya (in 2024, for State of Emergency, reviewed here), to North Korea (in 2018, for Red Ink, reviewed here), to the United States (also in 2018, in Margins of Excess, reviewed here), and to Thailand (in 2016, in Lotus, reviewed here). In each case, he has thoughtfully questioned the objectivity of documentary photography, expanding his image making to include performance, restaging, and other subjective or fictitious perspectives to explore the wider potential nuances of storytelling and history.

Pinckers chose 2020-MMXX as the title of the photobook that brings together his Roman pictures, and while it is a literal rendering of the date of the photographs, it also quietly hints at the conceptual framework of the visual content inside. The title offers two different versions of the date, in typical modern number form and in Roman numerals, signaling that there are two alternate ways to view or name the same year. Both successfully label the moment, but perhaps with different historical contexts or implied chronologies. It is this idea of competing perspectives of the same reality that stands at the center of this Roman photographic project.

With the city largely on lockdown, the streets of Rome were surprisingly empty for Pinckers, with few tourists at the Colosseum, no boats on the Tiber, the cafes less populated than usual, and the grassy parks largely vacant. So Pinckers seems to have enlisted a few intrepid people to stage everyday scenes in and around the city, which he then photographed. But instead of making single exposures of his stage-managed setups, he arranged several cameras to capture the scenes simultaneously from multiple angles.

This isn’t a new idea – Barbara Probst (in a recent retrospective catalog, reviewed here) has made an entire artistic career out of exploring the puzzling complexities of photographic synchronicity. But Pinckers’s investigations into similar themes feel like a logical outgrowth from his previous work, where the traditional idea of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” has been shown to be less than entirely credible, and new ways of documenting multiple (in some cases competing) perspectives have been required.

Pinckers introduces this illusion of photographic singularity through a pair of images that bookend the sequencing of the pictures. He opens with a rooftop view down over the city of Rome, with two hands holding a camera that frames a segment of road down in the distance. In the first image, the camera and hands are blurred, bringing the city into sharp focus and drawing our attention towards its buildings and other details. And in the last image, the camera and hands are now in focus, and the city has drifted into enveloping blur, centering us instead on the presence and activity of the photographer. The two photographs capture the same instant, but with two radically differing perspectives on what is important, or even worth seeing. This is the essential conceptual framework of 2020-MMXX, which is then explored in much more depth in a series of ten staged scenes.

Pinckers seems to have generally been using a two camera setup, with opposing vantage points of a given moment often arranged to highlight different faces or expressions. There is a champagne-fueled kissing scene not far from the Colosseum, a street encounter of a man pulling open a woman’s eyes, a balcony view of two women posing together, and a Jeff Wall-like balletic setup of two men punching each other on cobblestones, each scene viewed from two angles, emphatically making the point that there is no single privileged perspective on any photographic instant. Pinckers then goes on to use grainy enlargements (often on fold outs) to tunnel in further, zooming in on one view of many. This is particularly effective in a setup of three men talking at a sidewalk bar, and in a boat scene where three young people stare off into the distance and look at their phones, clearly together and alone, with three different personal realities taking place.

In a few scenes, Pinckers isn’t afraid of showing us the photographic apparatus required to create his synchronized images, with the placement of cameras on tripods captured as part of the arrangements. He uses this “behind-the-scenes” effect in a setup of a woman cleaning a statue in a stairwell, and in an unpeopled arrangement made while photographing a still life painting. Again, we see the action from competing positions, creating a hybrid view of what is actually taking place.

The most complex staging in 2020-MMXX comes in the form of a park scene, with three people hanging out near some rocks. One woman sits on a rock by herself, and nearby a young man kneels near a woman lying on her back with her arms raised – even with three perspectives (in a three-camera setup this time), it’s hard to make out what’s going on, if anything. Inside the double fold out, we move forward a few seconds to reveal that the man and woman in the grass are actually now wrestling or fighting, and the earlier moment was simply the prelude to the more intense action. Overall, the arrangement feels quite mannered, but the series of images breaks up both the space and the time in intriguing ways.

The success of 2020-MMXX hangs on the conceptual clarity of its structure. It reminds us that there is something always outside the frame of any given photograph, a counterpoint to the choice the photographer has made. In this way, time is never really singular, but instead layered and overlapped, with gestures, expressions, relationships, and tiny nuances of pose offering alternate readings from opposing angles. With the silence of the pandemic as a backdrop, Pinckers has crafted a clever deconstruction of photographic vision, with every small human story we might encounter on the streets of Rome offering much more inherent complexity than we usually notice.

Collector’s POV: Max Pinckers is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp (here) and Tristan Lund in London (here). His work has little consistent secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.