Thierry Clech was born in France in 1965, he lives in Paris.
He only uses silver-based photography and his pictures are exclusively black and white.
He takes photographs during his travels : India, Japan, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Ukraine...
His work has already been shown in France and abroad (National library of Belorussian,
the Nadar gallery, the Barrobjectif festival, the Book and photography festival of
Tourcoing, the FotoIstanbul festival...). He has published two books in association with
French writers, Philippe Jaenada (« Déjà vu », published by Philippe Chauveau editions,
2007) and Bernard Chambaz (« Imprimer le Monde », published by Les Éditions du
Tigre, 2010), and a book dealing with Japan, « Explosante-fixe », published in 2015 by Iki
editions in the Pont Rouge collection.
Thierry Clech is also a script-writer
« As a photographer and traveler, Thierry Clech catches the essence of the cities he
explores with surprising sharpness, his pictures are both spontaneous and elaborated,
with a striking beautiful imagery revealing the very intensity of a moment.
The pictures both show typical daily-life situations, and completely unique ones,
reflecting the deep sensitivity of the artist to time flying and the impermanence of
things. Just like cartoons drawn from life by a subtle onlooker, the scenes to which we
are witnesses are sometimes funny, sometimes moving, but anyway, they are always
surprising and rich as they can be interpreted at various levels. Although Thierry Clech
takes his pictures without any anticipation, they all show his undeniable mastery of
composition, a natural ability to tell intricate stories through refined-style pictures. »
Valérie Douniaux, Doctor in History of Arts, specialized in photography and Japanese
contemporary art, publisher.
« Thierry Clech can see the world like nobody else. In any case, he manages to put the
world rules inside the frame of his pictures. Fortunately or thanks to his instinct or I
don't know how, he is often in the right place at the right time. He could have probably
stayed in Paris, within the ring road, within the twenty districts of his garden, and almost
get the same result - because a man is a man, wherever he is. But the world is not so
wide, it was better to travel around it. Just to be absolutely sure. Go around it. Then he
has been nearly everywhere on the globe, almost at random, he has stopped a few
moments in a city of the northern hemisphere, by a field in the southern hemisphere,
and he has come back with pictures which approximately show the same thing in the
form or in substance : human beings in the heart of their environment, stuck in the
setting, stifled, trapped or integrated, assimilated but not totally, always isolated, just like
oil in water, anxious, absent-minded, busy or passive, fearful, overtaken by events, brave,
rebellious, lost, determined or exhausted. Mankind in the setting. »
Philippe Jaenada, novelist, Chevalier de l'Ordre des arts et des lettres.
