Stéphane Gizard

Born in Paris, Stéphane Gizard discovered the camera at the age of 7. After studying Communication and an artistic foundation course, he started to work at the age of 20 for the photo departments of several magazines. He also worked with news agencies such as Sygma or Sipa. He takes portraits of personalities such as Christopher Walken or Peter Falk, and these pictures get international attention.

At the age of 23, he produced his first personal work: "Garçons et fille…", a series of portraits presenting 35 boys and one girl, all of them taken in the street, offering a reflection on the sexual ambiguity of teenagers. With this experience, and the random people he meets, taking portraits of strangers is an obvious choice for him. These photos are shown in Paris in 1998, at the American Centre and then in Valenciennes, as well as in Cholet.

The same year, he leads photography workshops at the Unesco in Paris and in two schools, in Madrid and in London, in collaboration with the association Childrens Academy on Tour. His work is supported by the European Community. In 2006, he started the "Dress code" series. For this, he photographed 200 teenagers in their personal outfits. This resulted in portraits taken in the studio, after 8 months of casting in the street, without any styling. The first part of the series, "Dress code Paris", was completed in July 2007. At first shown as a traveling exhibition (Maison de Solenn in October, Point Ephémère in November) the collection was also shown at the Citadium-Printemps store (Paris). This first series of the artist is shown today internationally (Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan). Gizard photographs, without a break, young people (17/20 years old), who in his opinion go through a decisive phase between the end of youth and the beginning of adulthood. It's the time for the search of oneself. His first monograph "Modern Lovers" (2013) was really successful. After best sales at Strand, the principal bookshop of Manhattan, the book was reedited in 2015 (Bizarre Publishing, NY). In 2014, Gizard worked as an artistic director on the feature film "Bizarre" of Etienne Faure, chosen for the film festival at Berlin in 2015. Following the film project, Gizard had an exhibition with his new work on identity "Like Me" at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, 2015. "New Faces" is his second monograph (Bizarre Publishing, New York).