Elisabeth Van Vyve, Untitled, 1993–2013
© Clément Van Vyve/Collection Bruno Decharme
… Photo Brut: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie at the American Museum of Folk Art, New York City…
_The artist I kept returning to in the show, time and again, is its most spartan and tranquil, an outlier in an assembly of often cacophonous outliers. Elisabeth Van Vyve, a woman with autism and hearing problems who now lives in a retirement home in Antwerp, has used disposable color-film cameras for decades to catalogue her circumscribed visual environment in obsessive detail, creating albums of thousands of snapshots that inevitably evoke the postmodern banal-sublime of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and early Fischli & Weiss.1