Thirry Valencin - Blainville 2007

Born in 1962 in the Mâconnais, Thierry Valencin, after several years spent in French Polynesia, leaves France for Germany, where he stays for nearly ten years. In Frankfurt and then Munich, he founds the Demi-Lune photography gallery, thus discovering the city’s cultural and artistic scene. His encounters with painters, writers, filmmakers, theatre people and especially photographers gradually lead him to take up the camera himself.

Encouraged by the quality of his early shots, he perfects his technique through various assistantships — fashion magazines, television sets, film shoots, album covers — while developing a personal voice. From his first images, a mastery of the gaze asserts itself, one that will continue to deepen over the years. Despite the diversity of his experiences, his photographic journey remains of remarkable coherence, faithful to an initial intuition that runs through his entire body of work.



Back in France in 1995, he devoted himself entirely to photography. His numerous journeys nourish and affirm his gaze. He then founded Atelier Valencin, a place of research and production where he furthered, in particular, the techniques of silver gelatin printing and developed a very personal conception of blur. In his work, grain, light and shadow do not describe the image: they make it appear, revealing the intimacy of landscapes, objects and bodies.

In 2010, he published Au bord de l’autre, a work gathering thirty-four photographs taken over more than twenty years, spanning India, Europe, the United States, and France. Designed as a voluntary wandering, this book bears witness to a receptive gaze, attentive to everything that occurs, where each image becomes a moment of humanity and poetry.