Gabriel Dia

Gabriel Dia (third prize, Filippo Roversi grant) was born in 1985 in Senegal. Exiled to France in 2003, he lives and works in Paris. After ten years in nuclear engineering, he dedicated himself to his passion and deepened his knowledge by doing a bachelor's degree at EFET (no date, the great photography school) in 2020. "With a great penchant for auteur photography, it seems to me that the essential of my work so far aims to exorcise painful childhood memories" explains the photographer. Gabriel Dia was born on December 18, 1985, in Rufisque, Senegal. A trained engineer, he also develops an artistic language through writing. A passion that drives him to publish, in 2013, his first novel "la naissance d'une vierge" at Éditions de Montigny.

Having always been sensitive to photographs, he nourishes his imagination with the works of Dominique Issermann and Peter Lindbergh among others. But the discovery, in 2015 at the Polka gallery, of the photographs of Sebastião Salgado was a revelation: he decided to dedicate himself to photography which, in his own words, "can say more things at the same time". In 2017, he presents his first photographs "Nature". A universal work that Gabriel Dia describes as being inspired by his life and which echoes the eternal questions everyone asks themselves: where do we come from? who are we? where are we going? - ArtsDesignAfrica_Gallery