Photographing the Unfinished: Lessons in Trust, Truth, and Uncertainty from Magnum's Bieke Depoorter

“I’m not so sure anymore what it means to tell the truth.”— Bieke Depoorter, Chance Encounters

What happens when a photographer no longer believes in photography’s claim to truth? For Bieke Depoorter, that uncertainty has become her compass. I recently took the time to delve into her Magnum Learn course. Chance Encounters isn’t a technical tutorial. It’s a quiet unraveling of assumptions — about authorship, representation, and what it means to tell someone else’s story.

Depoorter’s core idea is deceptively simple: the image is not enough. “A photograph can never be the full story,” she explains. “It’s always just a moment, and it’s always from my point of view.” Rather than resolve this limitation, she leans into it. Her practice doesn’t aim to define or explain — it complicates. Her work is a kind of philosophical enquiry: What can we really know of another? What do we bring to the act of seeing? And whose voice gets to shape the narrative?

One of the strongest lessons from Chance Encounters is her insistence on humility. Depoorter frequently describes herself as “a person first, photographer second.” That phrase recurs like a mantra. It’s not about placing empathy above art; it’s about recognising that human interaction is the raw material of her work. Her most intimate images emerge not from strategy, but from moments of mutual vulnerability. “It’s not about the camera,” she says. “It’s about the relationship.”

This way of working resists control. It embraces doubt. In projects like Agata and Michael, Depoorter opens herself — and her process — to chance, contradiction, even failure. She describes the act of photographing Agata as “not just taking her portrait, but constantly negotiating what that portrait means — for her, for me, for the viewer.” Agata is not a subject captured; she is a co-author. In fact, in later iterations of the work, Agata’s own annotations sit alongside Depoorter’s images — challenging, correcting, complicating.

“At some point I realised: maybe it’s okay that I don’t understand the story. Maybe the fact that it’s unclear is the story.”

This ambiguity extends across all her projects. With Michael, a man she met briefly on the street in Portland, the relationship took an unexpected turn. He gave her three suitcases of writings, journals, collages — and then disappeared. For years, she’s been sorting through his archive, trying to understand him through the fragments he left behind. But as she admits, “I don’t know who he really is. And maybe I never will.”

Rather than see that as a shortcoming, Depoorter treats it as a form of truth. Her photographs become spaces where questions are held, not answered. There is no resolution, only ongoing negotiation. “It’s not about showing something,”she says. “It’s about showing that I don’t know.”

This is deeply countercultural in an image-saturated world. Where most photographers chase clarity, Depoorter invites ambiguity. Where others seek authorship, she surrenders it — often inviting her subjects to revise or reshape the work. That can be ethically uncomfortable. It can also be profoundly generous.

In Chance Encounters, she describes her editing process not as construction, but as listening. “You try to hear what the story wants to be, rather than impose what you want it to be.” The result is work that feels alive — provisional, questioning, unfinished.

“I think the work becomes stronger when I allow space for doubt.”

And perhaps that is the most enduring lesson from investing the time listening to Beike : that in art, as in life, doubt isn’t something to overcome. It’s something to work with. Depoorter’s photographs are not documents of what is. They are records of encounters — human, fragile, unresolved.

She leaves us not with conclusions, but with questions. Not a finished narrative, but an invitation to sit in the in-between.

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