Samuel Bollendorff

Samuel
Bollendorff

The night falls on Europe / La Nuit tombe sur l'Europe

BIOGRAPHY

French photographer and director, distributed by Agence VU’, based in Paris (France).

Born in 1974, Samuel Bollendorff studied at the Louis Lumière school and then sharpened his sense of observation and his reflection on the form of his work at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He then began working as a freelance press photographer and collaborated with the daily newspaper Libération for 5 years.

Samuel Bollendorff thus developed his documentary photography style, and offered a social view of French institutions – hospitals, schools, police, prisons – their missions and their difficulties by questioning the place of individuals in public services over time. He also extended the territory of his investigations beyond national borders and the formal boundaries of photojournalism, notably with “SilenceSida” – a project of photographic portraits dealing with the inequality of access to treatment and the social consequences of this scourge in Malawi, Uganda, Russia and Brazil – as well as with “À marche forcée”, a series on the forgotten people of the Chinese economic miracle, where photographs and testimonies are inseparable.

It is by pursuing this questioning of photography as a tool for political reflection that Samuel Bollendorff contemplates new forms of narration. Combining photography and testimonies – textual, audio or video – his work is enriched by the innovations of documentary narration and interactive enunciation techniques to give, beyond factuality, something to think about rather than something to merely see. In 2002, he directed his first documentary, “Ils venaient d’avoir 80 ans”, a 52-minute film that chronicles a year of life in the heart of a geriatric ward.

In 2004, his photo and video work on the suburb cities of Grigny II and Grande Borne led to the first mixed exhibition at the Visa pour l’image photojournalism festival. At the end of 2008, Samuel Bollendorff made his first interactive web documentary “Voyage au bout du charbon”, published on Le monde.fr and he then got awarded the SCAM Prize for Interactive Digital Art.

While Samuel Bollendorff is committed to renewing visual forms, he is also committed to documenting in-depth subjects whose existence suffers from public invisibility. Whether it is about immolations in France (“Le Grand Incendie”), violence against refugees (“La Nuit tombe sur l’Europe”), “Les morts de la rue” (eponymous series) or about the “invisible” but very present environmental pollution throughout the world (“Contaminations: Après moi le Déluge”), the same concern: “How can we give an account? There is no need to show violence (…) to receive its shockwave. On the contrary. The calm and emptiness of the place nourish everyone’s imagination. The orchestration of denial is a figure of horror”.

Samuel Bollendorff is the author of 6 monographs, 6 video documentaries and 7 interactive documentaries. His work is regularly published and exhibited in France and internationally and has been awarded prestigious prizes including among other, the Hachette Foundation’s Special Prize, the SCAM Prize for Interactive Digital Art, the Europa Online Prize in Berlin, the Visa d’Or for web documentaries.

SERIES

Border workers, pendular lives, 2022

Series | The social crisis linked to the end of the steel industry has left Lorraine economically drained region whose workers have had no choice but to turn to neighboring Luxembourg. An immersion in in this region, to draw up the outlines of a typology of border workers.