BIOGRAPHY
A graduate of the École Nationale Louis Lumière, it is through photography that Bertrand Desprez reconciles two radically opposed aspirations that inhabit him: on the one hand, a desire for freedom and unhindered solitude, on the other, the need an anchor, a reassuring shore. The photographic work that he has been developing for more than 30 years questions, in subtlety and elegance, the relationship between man and his environment. After his first personal works on the jazz scene of the 80s, he gained recognition in the profession with For a few stars , a long-term investigation drawing, in black and white, the fragile and sensitive portrait of adolescents in France. In 1998, in Japan, a shift occurred: with the discovery of another culture, he switched to color and integrated the principle of serial variation of motif, without renouncing the documentary subtlety which characterizes his work.
Attentive to a non-spectacular reality, far from any cliché, 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 fits into it through its activity, mainly sport and leisure, that Bertrand Desprez testifies without presupposition or exoticism of our contemporary societies - French or foreign (Japan, Mali, Brazil, Cuba, Indonesia, etc.). In permanent collaboration with the press, he produces numerous reports on sport in France or abroad and questions what this individual or collective, amateur or professional, “physical activity” reveals as intimate and social. Author of four monographs, Bertrand Desprez is winner of the CCF Foundation Prize for Photography (1997) and the Kodak Critics Prize (1999). Regularly published and exhibited, his photographs have joined, among other collections, those of the CCF Foundation for Photography, the National Contemporary Art Fund and the HSBC Collection.
