Photo Poche Stéphane Duroy

Evoking the silent crash of a fragmented world and the poetry of disenchantment, the photographs of Stéphane Duroy (b. 1948) impose themselves on the viewer, laden with the weight of absence.

For over forty years, he has been crisscrossing Europe and the United States, following in the footsteps of the tragedies that shaped the 20th century and their consequences for individuals. Initially working as a press photographer for the Sipa agency, he gradually detached himself from documentary photography, devoting himself to developing a body of work on four major projects in England, Berlin, Eastern Europe and the United States.

"Today, this obsessive journey forms a closed theater prefiguring the sequence of our behaviors, group survival, power and its struggles, failure, bitterness, rejection, and finally escape, a mixture of sincere hope and duplicity."

A member of the VU' agency since 1986, regularly exhibited and published, Stéphane Duroy takes an uncompromising look at his time, preferring the contemplative to the denunciatory.

In 2009, he decided to explore new territories of expression. He mishandled dozens of copies of his book Unknown, published by Filigranes in 2007, adding layers of material, collages of press clippings, anonymous photographs, paintings, erasures and tears. Destroy to rebuild. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, he has been keeping a personal diary, producing one painting a day.