Jean-François Lepage

Lepage was born in Paris, France, in 1960. He was introduced to photography by his uncle who was art director at Cosmopolitan magazine. He then discovered the work of the street photographers Henri Cartier Bresson, William Eugene Smith and Robert Frank as well as the fashion photographers Erwin Blumenfeld, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. In 1977, Lepage left school before graduating and worked at the post office. Two years later, after a one-year trip to the United States and Mexico, Lepage joined the photographer's assistant team of the Marie Claire magazine studio in Paris. He started his photographic career in 1980 and made his first exhibition of portraits of the French actress isabelle Adjani in 1983. His early photographs featured in magazines including Depeche Mode, Jill Magazine, Vogue UK and Condé Nast Publications in Italy. After the birth of his son Vincent, Lepage began to devote himself to drawing and painting in 1987. During his self-imposed exile from editorial photography, Lepage has shot the album cover of the German singer Nina Hagen in 1989 as well as campaigns for Laura Urbinati in 1988, Jil Sander in 1990 and Masaki Matsushima in 1998.
Lepage returned with a new approach in 2001 – moving outside the studio to create new series of stories for magazines. In this work he intentionally showed the source used to light his subjects and to compose and balance his flash light with the Sun, to create a new perspective. Over the past three decades, his photographs were published in international magazines such as Another Man Magazine, Double, Exit, Italian Amica, Purple and Vogue among many others. His work at the intersection of painting, cinema and contemporary photography, represents a very different way of seeing the world of fashion. His approach is similar to that of the plastic arts and illustrates a significant change in fashion photography. In 2013, Lepage worked with curator Raphaëlle Stopin to present the exhibition 'Memories from the Future' during the 28th International Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography.
In 2014, Jean-François Lepage had begun to pull away from fashion. MOONLIGHT ZOO, his first monograph was published in April 2015 by Prestel Publishing while at the same time his latest series entitled Recycle – the first opus of his most recent photographic work – was exhibited in Paris, Amsterdam and London.

Lepage is a great admirer of the painters Albrecht Dürer, Diego Velázquez, Kandinsky, Picasso and Braque, and his photographs reflect his love for painting. Working with large format film cameras, Lepage's photography is produced on a knife's edge. His hands-on in the gelatine, like a paintbrush in oil and pigments, the photographer reconstructs the body's anatomy, cutting the negative to build a new, multiple image. From these cut, multiplied, recomposed faces and bodies, a complex identity suddenly rises to the surface. The character's individuality emerges and creates an oscillatory wave that disturbs the peaceful surface of the image, causing it to waver between seduction and repulsion, sophistication and brutality. These images, with their stripped-back composition, are inhabited by strangely motionless beings, suspended in their own time and space; while lost in their dreams and thoughts, they meander through a land where the imaginary world of the photographer, the character and viewer's imagination project and come together.