Working exclusively in silver and black & white, Thierry Clech photographs according to his travels: Japan, Istanbul, India, Nicaragua, Ukraine... His images have been exhibited in France and abroad (National Library of Belarus, Nadar Gallery, Barrobjective Festival, Tourcoing Book and Photography Meetings, FotoIstanbul Festival...). He has published two books in collaboration with French novelists, Philippe Jaenada ("Déjà vu", published by Philippe Chauveau, 2007) and Bernard Chambaz ("Imprimer le Monde", published by Le Tigre, 2010), as well as two books on Japan and New York, "Exploosante-fixe" and "224 West, 49th St", published in 2015 and 2018 by Iki, in the Le pont rouge collection.
"As a photographer-traveller, Thierry Clech captures with astonishing acuity the essence of the cities he explores, and delivers images that are both spontaneous and very constructed, of striking visual beauty, that capture all the richness of the moment.
They show scenes that are both characteristic of the life of the place where they take place and totally unique, marked by a sensitivity to the passage of time and the impermanence of things.
Like vignettes sketched on the spot by a keen observer, the scenes we witness are sometimes amusing, sometimes touching, but in any case always surprising and rich in several levels of reading.
Although taken without premeditation, Thierry Clech's photographs all demonstrate a great mastery of framing, an innate ability to move from narrative complexity to formal purity. »
Valérie Douniaux, Doctor in Art History, specialized in photography and contemporary Japanese art, publisher.
"Thierry Clech knows how to see the world like no one else. In any case, he knows how the world works in the rectangle of his photos.
And by chance, or by instinct, or whatever, it is often in the right place at the right time. He could probably have stayed in Paris, inside the ring road, in the twenty districts of his garden, and achieved about the same result - because a man is a man, wherever he is. But the world is not that big, it was better to travel it. To be sure. Go around. So he travelled all over the globe, almost at random, he stopped for a few moments in a city in the northern hemisphere, on the edge of a field in the southern hemisphere, and brought back images that all show about the same thing, on the surface or at the bottom: the man at the heart of what surrounds him, trapped in his surroundings, suffocated, entangled or integrated, assimilated, but never really, always isolated, such as oil in water, worried, distracted, active or passive, fearful, overwhelmed, brave, revolted, lost, relentless or exhausted. The man in the picture. »
Philippe Jaenada, novelist, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, Femina Prize 2017.
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