Hugo Roelandt

From the beginning he [Roelandt] wasn’t interested in traditional narrative art photography, but in manipulating the reality in front of the camera. In 1974 he made a remarkable series of self-portraits entitled Feelings, in which he photographed his own face expressing, often in an exaggerated manner, a wide range of emotions. Around the same time he also made a series of photographic self-portraits in which he adopted, dressed in women’s clothes, provoking and seductive postures. These early examples of what we would now call ‘transgender awareness’ were made more or less simultaneously with self-portraits in drag by artists like Jürgen Klauke (whose work Roelandt knew thanks to Roger D’Hondt of the New Reform Gallery). But they also refer to the procession of the ‘Voil Jeanetten’ (men in women’s clothing) during the carnival in his home town of Aalst – a carnival he attended every year of his life. (Marc Holthof, 2016)