French photographer born in 1963, based in Paris (France)

Graduated of the Ecole Louis Lumière (Paris), Bertrand Desprez reconciles through photography two radically opposed aspirations that inhabit him: on the one hand, a desire for freedom and unfettered solitude, on the other, the need for an anchor, a reassuring shore. The photographic work he has been developing for more than 30 years thus questions, with subtlety and elegance, the relationship between man and his environment.

After his first personal works on the jazz scene in the 80’s, he acquired the recognition of the profession with his series “Pour quelques étoiles“, a long-term survey drawing, in black and white, a fragile and sensitive portrait of teenagers in France.

In 1998, in Japan, a shift occurred: with the discovery of a different culture, he switched to color and integrated the principle of serial declension of motifs, without giving up the documentary subtlety that characterizes his work.

Far from any cliché and attentive to a non-spectacular reality where “suddenly an ordinary object can become extraordinary and take us very far to the frontiers of the invisible“, it is through the prism of the landscape and the way in which the social body inscribes itself in it by its activity, mainly sport and leisure, that Bertrand Desprez testifies without presupposition nor exoticism of our contemporary societies – weather French or foreign (Japan, Mali, Brazil, Cuba, Indonesia, etc.).

In permanent collaboration with the press, he produces numerous reports on sports in France and abroad and questions what this individual or collective, amateur or professional “physical activity” reveals of intimacy and sociality. In parallel to his personal work and editorial commissions, he also puts this double documentary and aesthetic approach at the service of companies, mainly for the realization of portraits.

Author of four monographs, Bertrand Desprez is the winner of the CCF Foundation Prize for Photography (1997) and the Kodak Critics’ Prize (1999). Regularly published and exhibited, his photographs have been included in the collections of the CCF Foundation for Photography, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain and the HSBC Collection, among others.