Jean Pierre Favreau

From west to east, from south to north, from the desert to the megacity, Jean Pierre Favreau invites us, through his photographs, to travel the world. In doing so, he embarks on a unique quest—that of an endlessly renewed dream capable of expressing both wonder at the world’s beauty and uncertainty in the face of its gaps and flaws. From the vast expanses of the desert to deserted cities, the photographer charts a course that leads us to a deeper understanding of inner paths, opening his practice to a form of “autobiography without events,” to borrow Pessoa’s beautiful phrase.
If travel nourishes photography, conversely, photography nourishes a journey that is not merely geographical, but inner, opening up to the imaginary and the symbolic. Thus, Jean Pierre Favreau’s photographs reveal a road, a path, the traces of a walk, attempts to open the frame or step outside it, the threshold and its crossing. Sea or sky appear to represent a beautiful escape, a vanishing point, a perspective within the turbulent infinity that is life.
Thus, between lines and curves, shadows and light, movement and stillness, these photographs are permeated by a tension that is not merely aesthetic, but metaphysical.
Jean Pierre Favreau photographs the world and humanity as a tightrope walker, on a wire stretched between earth and sky, revealing the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the monumental and the insignificant, what endures and what fades away, the human and what transcends it. In this way, he confronts us with a sense of unease.
If, in accordance with its etymology, to photograph is to write with light, Jean Pierre Favreau’s photographic writing redefines our relationship to the world and the contours of time against a backdrop of darkness. To photograph, then, is to draw poetry from the everyday—a poetry we thought had been drained of life—to encounter the otherworldly at a street corner, to express humanity in its beauty and fundamental ambivalence, to capture the harmony of man when he becomes one with nature or a horse.

Photography thus emerges as a way to inhabit the world as a poet, to shake off our complacency, and to propose novel associations between distant and unsuspected realities. Faced with the sharp edges of reality and time, the circular motion of a carousel—where the gaze anchors and drifts, where movement and repetition converge, and which is mimicked by a little girl clinging to a post—opens up to the eternal return and the cycle of life, and speaks to us of humanity’s diversion in a godless sky.
Sylvie Loignon University Professor

Portrait of Jean Pierre Favreau

1940, La Rochelle, France

Jean Pierre Favreau joined the Viva agency team in Paris in the early 1970s. At the same time as working as a photo reporter for the press, he travelled the world: the United States, Latin America, South East Asia. These travels marked the beginning of a creative process that he began in earnest in the early 1980s.
He then chose to focus on the man in the city and his inner questioning, surprised in his moments of wandering when he escaped the urban world.
Part of his work will be collected much later in a book Incertaines Cités published by Filigranes in 1998.

In 1982 he received a grant from the French Ministry of Culture to work on New York.
In the meantime, from 1985 to 1991, he stayed regularly in Cape Verde. A book entitled Blues Outremer was published by Contrejour in 1992 and his photos were exhibited in the newspaper Le Monde, at the Contrejour gallery and at the Universal Exhibition in Seville.

A regular contributor to the newspaper Le Monde, he produced several special issues, including one on France, which was the subject of an exhibition in 1992.

As a freelance photographer, he was entrusted with various missions by the Ministry of Culture on the Plastic Arts in France, which led to a publication by Autrement in 1986, and by the Ministry of Agriculture, which led him to Great Britain for Rural Europe and to France for the Sustainable Development Plan.

From 1991 to 1998, he made several trips to Havana, which gave rise to Rue Caraïbes, a book published by En Vues in 1999.

From 2001 to 2016, he chose Japan to expand his work on man in the city.

2006-2008, he receives a Public Commission from the city of Rochefort sur Mer.

Today, Jean Pierre Favreau’s photographs are part of the national photographic collections and are preserved by the Heritage and Photography Media Library (Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie.)

In 2024, the city of Rochefort will dedicate an exhibition (catalog) to him at the Hèbre Museum in partnership with the Heritage and Photography Media Library.

Brighton 1998 / Great Britain 1993 / Grenoble 1990 / Havana / Lisbon 1990 / Naples 1986 and 1987 / New York 2010 / 1981 / 1982 / 1984 / Paris 1987 / Rome 1987 and 1988 …