Julien Guinand

Julien Guinand’s detailed documentary and experimental photographic work focuses on the land, on the places in which social and environmental history unfolds. He primarily looks at spaces and landscapes impacted by human activity and the Capitalocene. His works are rooted in elements of nature, visible and invisible forces, the traces of time and the aesthetic potential of certain spaces. He pays particular pictorial attention to the subjects he documents and makes room for tension between the document and the image-object. The composite nature of his work is reinforced by the videos and sound pieces he creates, which echo his photographs, as well as by the various documents and archives that he collects for his projects.

Julien Guinand graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles in 2000. He has been a teacher at ENSBA Lyon since 2007. In 2017, he was an artist-in-residence at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, and received support from the Fondation des Artistes for his project Two mountains, which explored the shaping and destruction of landscapes in contemporary Japan. The project was the subject of a book published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2021, and of a major exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry in 2022.
In 2022 and 2023, he took part in a creative residency programme at the Centre d’art éditeur Le Point du jour in Cherbourg, which is set to lead to in a solo exhibition in 2025.
In 2024, he received a support grant for contemporary documentary photography from the CNAP for his new project centred on nuclear power in Japan. He also took part in another residency with the Musée d’Art et d’Industrie de Saint-Étienne, which will lead to an exhibition in 2026.

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2024