Jean-Christophe Béchet

Born in 1964 in Marseille, Jean-Christophe Béchet has lived and worked in Paris since 1990.

Combining black and white and color, film and digital, 24x36 and medium format, polaroids and photographic "accidents", Jean-Christophe Béchet looks for the "right tool" for each project, one that will allow him to create a relevant dialogue between an interpretation reality and a photographic material.

His photographic work develops in two directions that constantly intersect and respond to each other. Thus, on the one hand, his approach to reality makes him close to a form of "poetic documentary" with a permanent interest in "street photography" and urban architecture. He then speaks of his photographs as INHABITED LANDSCAPES.

In parallel, he has been developing for more than fifteen years a research on the photographic material and the specificity of the medium, in silver as in digital. For this, he focuses on technical "accidents", and revisits his photographs of reality by confronting them with several printing techniques. He thus restores, beyond the shooting, this work on light, time and chance which are, according to him, the three pillars of the photographic act.

For 20 years, this double outlook on the world has been built book by book, the space of the printed page being its "natural" field of expression. He is thus the author of more than 20 monographic books.

His photographs are also present in several private and public collections and have been shown in more than sixty exhibitions, notably at the Rencontres d'Arles 2006 (“Urban Policies” series) and 2012 (“Accidents” series) and at the Mois de la Photo in Paris, in 2006, 2008 and 2017.

After having been represented for a long time in Paris by "Les Douches la Galerie" (2005/2020),

Jean-Christophe Béchet works today with "La Galerie des Photographes" (29 rue Keller, 75011)