A gallery in the Algarve town of Loulé is staging a solo exhibition of work by Marc Lagrange, the Belgian photographer celebrated for his painterly, light-soaked images. The show opens on 16 October at In The Pink, Fine Photo Art, on Praça da República, and runs with viewing hours of Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 6pm, and Saturdays until 2pm.
Lagrange, born in Kinshasa in 1957, came to photography by a roundabout route. He trained and worked as an engineer first, then moved through fashion before settling into fine art from his base in Antwerp. He died in 2015, but his reputation has kept growing, with exhibitions and books across Europe and the United States keeping his name in circulation.
The centrepiece of the Loulé show is his Platinum Collection, a hand-printed series produced late in his life. For it, Lagrange returned to earlier images whose editions had already sold out and reprinted them using one of photography's most archival processes: each print is hand-coated with a platinum-based sensitiser and exposed under ultraviolet light. No two come out identical, which makes them prized by collectors and gives the show a real sense of occasion.
Alongside the platinum prints, visitors will see work from several of his other series. Lagrange's style is unmistakable: he shot on analogue film rather than digital, built his sets with obsessive care — down to the colour of a wall or the shape of a chair — and returned to the same models over years, turning them into long-term muses and creative partners. Even his nudes read as confident protagonists rather than passive subjects, which is part of why his work has aged well.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to spend time in Loulé itself, a market town inland from Faro that most visitors to the Algarve drive past on the way to the coast. Pair the exhibition with the covered market, the old castle walls and a slow lunch, and you have a half-day that has nothing to do with beaches. The gallery is right on the main square, so it slots easily into a wander.
Whether you collect photography or just fancy seeing rare prints made by a demanding craft process, it's an unusually strong reason to head inland.
