Stéphen JOLY
Born in 1971 in Cavaillon, France.
Lives and works in Montauban, France.
Stéphen Joly meets photography in his childhood. Through this practice, he creates his own intimate fictions and questions the human conditions and forms that shape them. His approach reflects his emotions, his sensations, a psychic, unstable and immaterial part of himself. He uses photography as an echo, a blind stick that allows him to perceive the correct distance between the void and matter.
Winner of the FNAC Attention Talent Photo prize in 2002, his research was presented in the FNAC Photo Gallery of Europe from 2002 to 2008, screened at the Voies Off of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles in 2003 and 2004, exhibited at the Forum de l'Image de Toulouse in 2004, at the Marseille 2004 International Contemporary Art Fair, at the Phonurgia Nova Radio Festival 2004, and more recently at the Stockk Gallery in Marseille.
Professionally Stephen Joly is self-taught and presents an atypical profile. He travel arround Europe and was successively, mechanic, army photographer, graphic designer, creative in communication agency, car technician, animator, animation manager, seller, waiter, handler, sound designer for a national radio, therapist, restaurant manager, catering consultant ... and photographer. Now in semi-retirement, he is returning to his favourite mode of expression : photography.
19 years of absence from any photograph, he starts several series in 2023/2024; "Metaxu" a talk about the between two, life, death, "Eros Mania" a talk about the absence, the heartbreak in love, "Gen Z" a series of portraits of generation Z, as well as ”Psychotrope”, a series of portraits of people treated in psychiatry.
