Requiem pour pianos 4, 2014

Romain Thiery  

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Romain Thiery, born in Bergerac in 1988, is an artist photographer living and working near Montpellier. Romain is an amateur pianist who started photography more than fifteen years ago following the work of his mother who specialized in heritage photography.

Romain Thiery believes that the piano is deeply rooted in the depths of our culture, and has sought to explore the instrument from an original angle. He made it his mission to combine his two greatest passions and set out to find buildings where old pianos lay abandoned. Since 2014, he has discovered more than a hundred pianos, in as many places of stunning beauty. Scenes he never changes, leaving the place as it is. “Even in the middle of a degraded space, the piano continues to retain its power. He is there, he is enthroned with all his nobility”.

Beyond his photographic work, Romain records in situ, when possible, note by note, all the sounds of the pianos he discovers. They will make it possible to manufacture a collection of virtual instruments that he will make available to the public online and during his exhibitions. This method allows him to create a realistic sound model, to immortalize the sound of these pianos and to capture their identities. These sample libraries will give a second life to abandoned and sometimes difficult to access pianos, giving hundreds of musicians around the world the opportunity to make them resonate.

This research led him to visit a large part of Europe as well as the United States. The series resulting from his works is called Requiem for pianos and has boosted his notoriety internationally. In recent years, he has won major international photography awards in different competitions. His individual and group exhibitions have been seen in North America, Europe and Asia. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and festivals in New York, San Francisco, St Petersburg, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Madrid, Tel-Aviv and many more.

The most prestigious press titles have already praised or treated his work in their pages such as El País, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Daily Mail, Lonely Planet, Cultura Inquieta, Point de vue, Esquire, Beijing News... and during TV reports on M6 (France), DW (Germany), Channel Cuatro (Spain), TV5 Monde (France) and I24 News (France and Israel).