Thierry Girard

Biography

Graduate of the Institute of political studies of Paris in 1974, Thierry Girard starts to photograph starting from 1976 after having in particular discovered the photographic work of Robert Frank. He then leaves in England to confront himself with the East End of London, At the beginning of the the Eighties, he endeavors to set up the esthetic codes of a photograph very influenced by American Walker Evans, or Lee Friedlander, halfway between the documentary Style and a more personal vision, which represents its own interpretation of the world. He photographs much in the North of France. This time was important in the field of the training of the image, and allowed him to conceive a work method on which it will support its work starting from “ Frontières ” (1984 - 1985). It is also the period when it obtains its first orders, of which one with Zuydcoote enables him to publish its first book, “ Far-Westhoek ” in 1982.

After having begun with the photography of report, in black and white and with the Leica, Thierry Girard gives up in the middle of the Années 1980 this “documentary” approach to be interested more in the Paysage. He undertakes an exploration of the landscape then, sometimes with foot (during photographic steps which accentuate the poetic side of its work), but generally by building routes, whose discussion thread can be geographical, but also to refer to literary or artistic pretexts: “ Gushing & dissolution ”, a voyage along the the Danube of Claudio Magris, the Road of Tōkaidō ”, with the Japan in reference to Hiroshige or “ the Large diagonal ” in China on the trâces of Victor Segalen). These routes are as many pretexts to an interior search, in the search of “signs” which it will collect in a very personal interpretation of space. From one project to another, there is always an evolution, a handing-over in question, a taking risk. Its vision was little by little stripped at the point to become, the beginning of the year 90, very minimalist and to translate poetic space nourished by the concepts of limit, threshold, crossing. That will become a constant in its work, constant which it will be able to renew in its projects of the end of the Années 1990 and the Années 2000 with the Japan and in China by the introduction of the color, the return to a more urban and contemporary landscape, and the reintroduction of the human factor. These concepts, which it continues to use in its current photography (where the question of the portrait becomes more and more prégnante in addition), bring back it towards a more documentary photograph, where the glance is done more intellectual, more analytical, more distancié. It results from it despite everything from the sometimes enigmatic images, which it connects between them by this discussion thread/pretext of the route.

In 1984, its work is rewarded by attribution for the prestigious Prix Niépce, which crowns a promising beginning of career and which will be worth to him to expose in old the Palais of Tokyo, at the time where Robert Delpire presented to it the exposures of the National center of photography.

It gives up the 24x36 gradually to work, always in black and white, average format (6x6, 6x7). About the middle of the years 1990, the color starts to appear in its work.

With the passing of years, he manages to interest more and more of silent partners, on which he knew to impose his vision of the landscape and which trust him by financing the personal projects that he subjects to them.

Its work regularly exposed in France and abroad is present in the large public collections and private.

In 2005, its photographs of Guadeloupe, Mount Saint-Michel and of Dunkirk, carried out especially for the occasion, are exposed to the entry of the French House of the World Fair of Aichi to the Japan.

It is represented in France by the Galerie Agathe Gaillard. Its galerist, Agathe Gaillard known as in connection with his photographs:

He photographs the Paysage such as he presents himself, such as we do it in there alive, without make-up, without conventions of picturesque. And paradoxically, thanks to its magic talent, France is such as we like it more. We even have in our memories, our unconscious, related to these photographs, of the feelings of happiness. These cold images become very emotional and a true great beauty apparaît.

In March 2006, in a small text of presentation of his work at the time of the exposure History of limits to the gallery Agathe Gaillard, Thierry Girard expressed his photographic approach: “In the great documentary tradition to which I refer (of Eugene Atget with Thomas Struth, while passing by Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander or Robert Adams, without drawing aside either the pictorial quotations and the “documentary tables” of a Jeff Wall), my principle is to photograph the simple reality of the things with a certain distance and a certain neutrality. ”

In connection with a recent work gathering of the portraits and the landscapes, Guy Tortosa written: The photographs of Thierry Girard are bulletins of this meteorology of the body and heart of our company. Deeply humanistic, they hesitate between empathy and report, proximity and inventory. Generally, the inhabitants are absent from places (villages, meadows, wood, ways, etc) which it photographs. The abandonment constitutes the main subject of it. Here it is appreciably different. Meetings took place. One thinks of the realism of Courbet, of Zola, August Sander, Bernanos, Straub and Huillet, or of Raymond Depardon. The usual walk of the artist was simply moulted in interview. did it There-have meets? One does not know. Only unquestionable thing, which says these portraits is what already the landscapes said: the country is like the man, present at his absence.

Price and Rewards

Thierry Girard received the Prix Niépce in 1984, was prize winner of the Villa Médicis out the walls in 1985, of the Bourse Léonard de Vinci in 1989 and of the Villa Kujoyama with the Japan in 1997. He received assistances with the creation of the Ministry for the Culture into 1983,1990 and 1998, profited from an public order of the Fnac in 2002, as well as a help with the writing of the National center of the Book in 2000.

Bibliography (selection)

Collective works

the Factory ( Fastenaekens, Girard, Kalvar, Vink ), Paris: Contrejour, 1987
Pétra, says it stones ( Elkoury, Girard, B.Guillot, Reverdot, Sagnes /texts of Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Adonis, Claude Ollier, Michel Butor etc ), Arles: Act-south, 1993 Littoral
( Batho, Depardon, Girard, Plossu, Sagnes, Sénadji etc ), Paris: Marval, 1994
In Maramures ( Claass, Serves, Girard /texts of Blangenois, Fournel, Jouanard ), Hôtel collection of the large mirror at Fata morgana, 1996
Médina, médinas ( Barrada, Girard, Rondeau etc ) Metamorphoses, Marseilles, 1999

Personal works

Far-Westhoek , Zuydcoote, 1982 (text of the author)
Earth between two/Medium of the river , Paris: Admired, 1988 (texts of the author)
the Dividing line , Paris: Admired, 1988 (texts of Bernard Werber and Vincent Cordebard)
Pallice , Paris: C. Geiss ED. 1990 (text of Raymond Bozier)
Peter Handke, places of the writing , Paris: Marval, 1991 (text of Fabienne Durand-Bogaert) .
With the Threshold of the Ninth country , Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 1992 (text of Swears Mikuz and of the author)
Brouage , Paris: Marval, 1993 (text of the author)
white Memory , Charleville: Museum Rimbaud-Museum of Ardenne, 1993 (text of the author)
Langlade, Miquelon, Saint-Pierre , Saint-Pierre and Miquelon: Arts center, 1994 (text of the author)
a voyage in Saintonge , Holy: JRC of the Abbey to the Ladies, 1995 (text of the author)
Thierry Girard , Gallery of the Water Tower, Toulouse, 1997 (text of Michel Dieuzaide)
an Atlantic Feeling/in Morocco , French Institute of Casablanca, 1997
the Road of Tôkaidô , Paris: Marval, 1999 (texts of Yuko Hasegawa, Nagahiro Kinoshita and Philippe Bata)
ordinary Days in China , (text of the author) , Nice: Theater of photography, 2001.
Of a sea the other , (text of the author) , Paris: Marval, 2002
Better memories , Châtellerault, Cardinals, 2003
the Vosges of North , the photographic observatory of the landscape, Imaginayres (2004)
Five ways of Vassivière , (text of the author) , National center of art and the landscape of Vassivière, Imaginayres, 2005

External bonds

Official site of Thierry Girard
See some photographs of Thierry Girard (of his exposure '' Histoires of Limits '') on the site of the gallery Agathe Gaillard
'' the Large diagonal '' on the site of the gallery Claudia Delank, Cologne
Short biography and three photographs of the Danube on the site of the Hungarian Museum of photography

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