Birth, death and marriage around the world through just one lens: the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM

Birth, marriage and death are constants around the world, yet strikingly varied across different societies. Over a period of six years, Belgian photographer and documentary filmmaker Lieve Blancquaert travelled the globe – from Africa to India to China, across the US and Europe – documenting how we are born, how we marry, and how we die in different cultures. She shot the diverse series entirely on one L-series lens, the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM.

The three-chapter project began with Birth Day (2013), continued in Wedding Day (2015) and concludes with Last Days (2018). Each chapter is made up of a TV series, book and exhibition.

The idea for the project came to Canon Ambassador Lieve while working on a documentary about mother and infant mortality rates in a small village on the Congolese border with Angola. "I'd been doing this job for a long time and I'd always felt like a tourist," she explains. "I realised that staying in one place – the place where children are born – gave me the opportunity to really go into the heart of a culture."

Life through one lens

Lieve's decision to use the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM lens exclusively was initially a matter of pragmatism. She always works with primes – 24mm, 35mm and 85mm – but tends to prefer a 35mm lens for portraiture. On shoots, however, she found herself positioned in front of the TV camera crew, extremely close to the action, and needed the wide 84-degree angle of view afforded by the 24mm lens to ensure she got everything in shot. After a while, it developed into a strategy. Dealing with sensitive subject matter, she found it to be increasingly important to immerse herself in the scene, rather than observing from afar.

"In the beginning I struggled with that lens," she says. "But now I believe it's good to be so close to people. You can't hide, you have to be in the open as a photographer, and I think that's an advantage in those particular moments." That wide angle pulls the viewer into the frame, creating a sense of intimacy, without distorting the perspective, thanks to the lens's aspherical elements.

Lieve was determined to use available light sources as much as possible, so the fast f/1.4 maximum aperture and low-light capability of the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM lens was a great help when the light conditions were unfavourable, from shooting in dingy apartments to lavish nighttime Delhi weddings. "Sometimes I used a flash, but only indirectly, and only when there was really nothing else to do," says Lieve. "I prefer to increase the image sensitivity. With this lens, you can push your ISO to 3000 or 4000 and still have beautiful results."

Circle of life

Above all, though, sticking with the same lens gave a visual consistency across the three series. Lieve is re-editing the three projects into Circle of Life, a forthcoming book and an exhibition running from September 2019 to January 2020 at St Peter's Abbey in Ghent, Belgium. "It's nice when you have a book or an exhibition done with one lens – it's like one line through all those stories," she says. "I believe the lens creates a very specific kind of atmosphere."

Whoever you are, wherever you live in the world, you are born and you die. In the brief moments just after we enter the world and before we leave it, we are, says Lieve, profoundly connected to one another. "But in between those two breaths – the first and the last – each life is a different story," she adds.

"I remember meeting a midwife in Israel who said to me, 'I am the first human being who ever touches a human being after they are born'. That touch has to be a very gentle, warm, welcoming gesture, because otherwise their life starts in a bad way. It makes you think, who touched me for the first time? And who will be the last?"