Represented by Gallery VU'
French. Born in 1961 in Paris where he presently lives.
Having graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 1986, Denis Darzacq began his career by following France's rock scene and became a set photographer for many feature films (Satyajit Ray, Jacques Rivette, Chantal Ackerman).
Like many other French photographers of his generation, Denis Darzacq worked in press photography which forged his artistic work and sharpened his eye for contemporary society. Darzacq takes the time for patient work in the field in direct contact with his subject. However he has broken with reporting and coverage-as-testimony in favour of a more analytical approach which has led to formally cohesive series.
His projects and work are exhibited in France and abroad. His photographs are now a part of collections in the National Modern Art Museum (Centre Georges Pompidou), in the Nicéphore Nièpce Museum's National Contemporary Collection in Chalon-sur-Saône, France; as well as at the Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, Paris, Gallery Chateau d'eau, Toulouse, the Caldic collection in Holland, the Regional Contemporary Art Collection of Haute Normandy, the Altadis Foundation...
Denis Darzacq was laureate of the first prize stories category in the World Press Photo 2007. He won the Altadis Prize in 2000 and Niépce Prize in 2012.
“Act” is the result of Denis Darzacq’s long work amongst people with learning disabilities. Even though some of the subjects are actors, athletes and dancers, each of them found in the acting and in the ownership of the public space a means to express the complexity of their individuality beyond the assigned label of “handicapped person”.
Denis Darzacq is well aware of the difference a handicap can create. But this difference yields to the assertion of a mental universe particularly sensitive in the way it is staged. Where the direction of the actors relies on the model’s spontaneity, not to say excentricity, while they interact with their surroundings to create a dreamlike dimension.
D’un coté, le décor stéréotypé et anxiogène des « lieux de vie » que sont devenus les hypermarchés, et de l’autre la puissance orgueilleuse de corps en action qui refusent la soumission et le silence.
Hyper
For many years now, I have questioned the place of the individual in our societies in my photographic work. This is achieved through the use of artistic but also purely documentary photography.
In “Hyper”, this questioning is structured around a formal opposition: between the body and its surroundings, or between being and having.
All my photographs are the fruit of shared real-life experience. There is no digital manipulation.
I asked young dancers and athletes to jump around, encouraged by the violence of their surroundings – hypermarkets – and their movements inspired by mannerist painting: unreal, overacted and pointless.
Movements of resistance to a consumerist...
Denis Darzacq made the Casques series in 2007 during a residency in Thouars. He was struck by the incongruous sight of teenagers wearing oversized, vividly coloured off-road helmets, flying around the streets of this unremarkable, provincial town on their 55cc scooters. Decorated with futuristic logos, vivid graphics and names such as “Spider” and “Nitro” bursting with promises of an action-packed life, these aerodynamic helmets with projectile-resistant masks transform their wearers into avatars from computer game or cartoon superheroes. Ordinary, fragile bodies metamorphose into visually arresting knights of the road.
This work was commissioned by the National Fund of Contemporary Art, by the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur DRAC and by Euromed public urban planning In Marseilles.
The aim of this work was to outline the quick transformation of downtown Marseilles, mainly due to the Euromediterranée project. This urban project, around La Joliette, the harbour, the northern highway and the docks shows a real will to win back the city center by pushing out both the working class and the mixed population, and replace them by middle class people and transform these districts into an enterprise zone.
In 2006, Denis Darzacq asked dancers and athletes to perform jumps against background that he had found and prepared. Wearing ordinary clothes chosen in agreement with the photographer, the performers executed their leaps in these precisely defined settings.
Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes . These moments really occurred. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in...
Algeciras harbour, Spain, 13th to 17th July 2005
Every year, more than 250 000 moroccan living abroad go back to Morocco. Most of them go there by car. They have to stay sometimes for hours on a car park before boarding the ferry to Tangiers.
During an entire year, Denis Darzacq has followed the daily life of four people: a 17 year-old teenager, a mother with her children, a trendy woman, and a true Parisian man. Four socio-cultural ways to live the city today.
La chute a été publiée en 2007 et le petit tirage de l'époque a fait que le livre s'est épuisé en quelques mois. Nous avons souvent des demandes de ce titre et avec Denis Darzacq, qui a toujours une actualité riche par des expositions, des workshop, nous avons décidé de publier une nouvelle édition enrichie d'images inédites, avec un format différent, une nouvelle mise en pages et l'accompagnement d'un texte inédit de Marie Desplechin pour ce livre.
Le travail de Denis Darzacq interroge la place de l'individu dans la cité. Avec cette série La chute, il livre un travail, sans trucage ni retouche photographique, sur les corps dans l'espace, sur le mouvement dans un environnement rigide. Ces images nous étonnent toujours.
(note de l’éditeur)
La série “La chute“ met en scène les corps en apesanteur de danseurs de Hip Hop de Capoeira et de danse contemporaine. Une « chute de l’ange » des années 2000, toute en tension et en énergie, entre ciel et terre.
Juste après la crise des banlieues de 2005, entre pesanteur et gravité, j’ai réalisé des photographies en suspension dans une architecture générique et populaire. J’aime qu’à l’ère de Photoshop, la photographie puisse encore surprendre et témoigner d’instants ayant réellement existé, sans trucages, ni manipulations explique Denis Darzacq…
Text by: Marie Desplechin Publisher: Filigranes Éditions (2013) 68 pages Size: 19x22 cm ISBN :2350462781
Act
"Les personnes en situation de handicap sont des gens à qui l'on dénie, dans mon imaginaire, la possibilité d'avoir une mobilité, une liberté d'action, et dont le corps a du mal à prendre sa place dans l'espace commun. Je crois que ce qui relie ces photographies, c'est l'effort que chacun a fourni pour sortir de l'image conventionnelle qui lui est attribuée".
Denis Darzacq.
"Mettre en jeu son corps en le poussant vers le danger ; du moins mettre sa fragilité à l'épreuve, parce qu'on est en lieu étranger, sans repères et sans boussole, avec pour seul mobile de dire un désir, de simuler une altérité, d'esquisser l'impossible, de révéler enfin des latences retenues".
Michel Frizot Text by: Michel Frizot et Virginie Chardin Publisher: Actes Sud (2011) 136 pages Size: 24 x 30cm
Hyper
Denis Darzacq se joue de la pesanteur des corps en les opposant à des environnements ordinaires dont il nous donne une lecture désenchantée. Il demande à de jeunes danseurs de se jeter à corps perdu et s'attache à suspendre l'instant juste avant le contact avec le sol. Les corps tombent ainsi, indifférents à leur propre chute. La photographie n'en est pas moins strictement documentaire. Là encore, l'humour n'est pas étranger à cette cohabitation entre galerie baroque et solennité des personnages.
Virginie Chardin Text by: Amanda Crawley Jackson Publisher: Filigranes (2009) 56 pages Size: 23,5 x 29 cm
La chute
La série « La chute » met en scène les corps en apesanteur de danseurs de Hip Hop de Capoeira et de danse contemporaine. Text by: Virginie Chardin Publisher: Filigranes (2007) 48 pages Size: 21x25 cm ISBN :2350460924
Bobigny centre ville
Marie Desplechin et Denis Darzacq se croisent un jour de 2004 par hasard à Bobigny. Amis depuis de nombreuses années, ils ont en commun une sensibilité probablement à l'origine de leur présence dans cette ville à la fois si proche et si loin de leur vie. Du hasard de cette rencontre est né ce livre. Mêlant le récit à l'image, Bobigny centre ville est une histoire de destins, d'amitiés, de cultures,
d'urbanisme, d'architecture, d'Histoire, de Mémoire et d'utopie. Text by: Marie Desplechin Publisher: Actes Sud (2006) 159 pages
A quatorze Kilomètres d'Auxerre
C'est intéressant de penser au grand flamboiement du ciel que nous passons au crible pour le réduire à des formes d'animaux et d'ustensiles de cuisine.
Outremonde
Don Delillo 1997 Publisher: atlantica (2004) 38 pages Size: 14x19 ISBN :2-84394-734-0
Le ciel étoilé au-dessus de ma tête (Fakestars + Nus)
Le ciel étoilé au-dessus de ma tête confronte, à première vue, deux aspects très différents du travail de Denis Darzacq. A première vue seulement car, à y regarder de plus près, c'est bien une seule et même grammaire photographique que l'artiste manie ici. Dans chacun de ses clichés, l'artiste contraint, marie ou assemble deux réalités a priori antagonistes, le ciel et des lumières artificielles, des paysages périurbains et des corps nus, pour transformer ces images documentaires en véritables oeuvres de fiction. Publisher: Léo Scheer (2004) 60 pages Size: 22x27 cm
Ensembles 1997 /2000
Las fotografias de Denis Darzacq nos representan, transeuntes en el corazon de las ciudades, como particulas que se encadenan, se cruzan y se evitan para reunirse finalmente. El artista considera el espacio publico como un teatro y sus Ensembles como representaciones de nuestras realidades. Publisher: Actes sud /Altadis (2001) 64 pages
Awards
2012 - Prix Niépce
2007 - Laureate of 1st place, "Stories" World Press Photo Award
Denis Darzacq’s work is on exhibition all over the world, from Phnom Penh to Geneva and from Sydney to Buenos Aires. However, the present exhibition, held by the new Dansmuseum, is the first time his work is shown in the Nordic countries.
Hyper 2007/2009 (Vern-sur-Seiche) From 2013-01-09 to 2013-02-20
A work made together with young dancers performing figures that are challenging all forms of gravitation in the environment of mass consumerism. Shelves of supermarkets saturated by consumer food, these images investigate the place of the individual in our societies, the conflict between being and having, body and decor.
La Chute makes the connection between photojournalism and Denis Darzacq’s artistic search crystal-clear. Inspired by a press report on hip-hop dancers, the series captures young dancers during leaps and jumps, with no recourse to any digital manipulation. Their bodies impose their en¬ergy, their lightness and their inventiveness on the dense geometry of the city space they invade. Darzacq borrows street culture’s very forms of expression and uses them as a tool for freedom. In a daring leap, youth fleetingly tears itself free of the weight of society. La Chute won 1st prize in the Arts and...
Denis Darzacq’s work often portrays people using their bodies to express a profound sense of freedom from the limitations that life has placed on them. In his latest work, the series “Act,” he worked with young adults leading difficult lives, their bodies challenged by conditions such as Down’s Syndrome or cerebral palsy. His subjects come from a variety of backgrounds, careers, and locations, from the south of France to the north of England and in the United States. His goal was for each person to express his individuality through a collaborative effort with the photographer. Working with...
Denis Darzacq’s work often portrays people using their bodies to express a profound sense of freedom from the limitations that life has placed on them. In his latest work, the series “Act,” he worked with young adults leading difficult lives, their bodies challenged by conditions such as Down’s Syndrome or cerebral palsy. His subjects come from a variety of backgrounds, careers, and locations, from the south of France to the north of England and in the United States. His goal was for each person to express his individuality through a collaborative effort with the photographer. Working with...
The Fall (Buenos Aires) From 2011-05-11 to 2011-06-03
The exhibition presented by the French Alliance of Buenos Aires and the Embassy of France presents the series "La Chute (The Fall)" by French photographer Denis Darzacq. In 2006, the series shows the evolution of bodies in urban space in Paris and its suburbs, bodies that seem to fall from the sky or a balcony, fallen angels or suicide. Others seem to levitate recalling the heroes of pop culture, video games and watching science fiction. There is no trick, no intervention of digital images, they are dancers and athletes who perform jumps that the photographer took the fly, in an already...
Freestyles (Bourg-en-Bresse) From 2011-05-06 to 2011-07-31
For over twenty years, Denis Darzacq has been building a sensitive photographic work that observes and captures the evolution of bodies in urban spaces, the standardization of the world and its representations, the social conformism and the individual, creative and liberating energy.\r\r"Freestyle", travel in Denis Darzacq’s work and photographic world presents thirty photographs from different series : Redial, Hyper, Helmets Thouars, The Fall, Downtown Bobigny, Nu, Together.\r\rA screening of three films complements the photographs.
Organised within the bounds of European Culture Capital Ruhr 2010, «inter-cool 3.0» is an exhibition about European dimensions of youth life today. It deals with current artistic movements and shows new forms of cultural dialogue. For the occasion, Denis Darzacq presents three photos of « Hyper ».
On the occasion of the International BredaPhoto Festival 2010 who’s thematic is articulated around the word “Tilt”, Denis Darzacq presents his series “Hyper”. \rA work made together with young dancers performing figures that are challenging all forms of gravitation in the environment of mass consumerism. Shelves of supermarkets saturated by consumer food, these images investigate the place of the individual in our societies, the conflict between being and having, body and decor.
This major group exhibition, in which contemporary artists explore – and on occasions recreate – the condition of weightlessness on earth, brings together artworks that use the metaphor of floating or weightlessness as an expression of the relationship of the individual to social, political or personal contexts. In addition, several of the pieces relate to lightness as akin to an agility of mind, freed of entrenched perspectives. Several pieces from Denis Darzacq’s series The Fall are part of the exhibition. In 2006, Denis Darzacq asked dancers and athletes to perform jumps against background...
Pure, avoiding both the traditional poses with that kind of description, the photographs highlight the physical performance in its perfection, but also in its imbalances, an incredible energy blend to a sense of the possible destruction. Indeed, the bodies in weightlessness, never surrounded by any shadow, become indicative of the urban space.
Christian Caujolle
HYPER refers to the new garish supermarkets in Paris and Rouen where consumer goods, brightly packaged and presented, make for a vivid and contemporary backdrop for his pictures. Darzacq brings street dancers, mostly young men and women in their late teens and early twenties into these stores and asks them to perform their leaps, jumps, twirls, and other gravity-defying movements. The photographs explore the tension between being and having, between the human body and the built environment. They offer a fresh, witty and intensely colorful commentary on global consumerism and freedom of spirit.
Three photographers have been invited for a photographic mission on campus life at Toulouse, Barcelona and Perpignan. It is all about showing the student what kind of look an artist can have on their way of life. The photographers have followed them around the campus, in town and in all their different social environments. Denis Darzacq is the photographer sent to Perpignan. “It seems to me they have not understood the complexity of the world in which we live in today. They are at home. They feel well there. They are little inclined to meet other people.”
In his series "The Fall" French photographer Denis Darzacq freezes the movement of dancers and athletes in the street. The artistic performance of dancers is derived from the range of breakdance and capoeira. The techniques are characterized by great individuality and spontaneity of the artist.
The astonishing photographs that make up Hyper involve no digital manipulation, just close collaboration between young dancers and sportspeople as they jump for the camera to form strange, exaggerated poses and body gestures. Denis Darzacq was drawn to the trashy, consumerist nature of the French Hypermarkets (the equivalent of our supermarkets) and the hyper coloured backgrounds they provided. These supermarkets offered a sharp juxtaposition to the sublime, almost-spiritual bodies that appear to float in their aisles.
Hyper is the latest series of works by French photographer Denis...
The astonishing photographs that make up Hyper involve no digital manipulation, just close collaboration between young dancers and sportspeople as they jump for the camera to form strange, exaggerated poses and body gestures. Denis Darzacq was drawn to the trashy, consumerist nature of the French Hypermarkets (the equivalent of our supermarkets) and the hyper coloured backgrounds they provided. These supermarkets offered a sharp juxtaposition to the sublime, almost-spiritual bodies that appear to float in their aisles.
Hyper is the latest series of works by French photographer Denis...
In denis Darzacq's photographic series, men and women walk naked in streets crossing residential areas. Yhey've come out of their homes, they march ahead to the rythmn of their steps, they cross the air which is at this moment of the day, an almost hazy white, like the light that shines completely upon them. These men and women have something to do, you can tell by the calm way they hold their bodies, they move ahead without hesitation, without restraint. perhaps, they are answering to a call. They go towards the same meeting ground, leaving behind them to constructed comfort of their habits....
Le Château d’Eau présente quatre séries du photographe français Denis Darzacq, du 4 février au 22 mars 2009 dans la Grande Galerie. 'Observant avec constance l’évolution des corps dans l’espace urbain, Denis Darzacq s’attarde aux frontières entre vie sociale et intimité. Il pose la question de la liberté individuelle, de l’énergie et de la force mouvante du désir dans un environnement dominé par l’uniformité, les modes de vie stéréotypés et l’encadrement des comportements collectifs. Indissociable d’un contexte qui est celui des années 2000, de la mixité ethnique, d’une jeunesse en quête de...
During the Month of the Photography, the City Hall of the twentieth district of Paris organizes a Denis Darzacq's exhibition in the Pavillon Carré de Baudoin. This exhibition is not only a retrospective of ten years of work, but it also shows, for the first time in France, two news series named "Hyper" and "Casques". His work is between documentary and artistic photography, always managing to stay close to reality.
Une trentaine de photographies extraites de plusieurs séries en couleur réalisées entre 2004 et 2006 seront exposées. Bobigny centre ville (2004), La chute (2006). La vidéo 29 vidéophones, Bobigny Centre ville réalisée à partir d’un montage de 29 courtes séquences prises avec un téléphone portable par Geoffrey Sorin, un jeune habitant de Bobigny sera également projetée dans l’espace d’exposition.
2007 World Press Photo award in the « Stories » category 2000 Altadis Award
Expositions
2009 Denis Darzacq, Le Château d'eau, Toulouse - France 2009 Body Language, La Galerie du Théâtre, La passerelle, Gap - France 2008 Body Sculpture, Pompidou Center, Paris - France 2008 Art, Price and Value, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence - Italy 2008 Out of Place, Robinschon Gallery, Denver - USA 2008 Le bruissement des images, CPIF, Pontault-combault - France 2008 The Fall / Bobigny, French Institute, New-York - France 2008 Carré Baudouin, Paris - France 2008 Hyper / Casques, Perth Centre for Photography, Fofofreo Festival,Perth 2008 The Fall, Maison Jean Vilar, Avignon - France 2008 The Fall, Le Quartz, Brest - France 2007 The Last day of Summer, Les Salaisons, Romainville - France 2007 Searching for Identity, Pontault-Combault Photographic Center - France 2007 Gallery de Soto, Los Angeles - USA
Parutions
Hyper, Stern View
Hyper, The Independant
Série Mode, Panorama Fisrt
Le Monde en 2008, Courrier Internationnal
Christian Bourgois, les Inrockuptibles
Hyper, L’Espresso
Bibliographie
2008 Bobigny Centre Ville, Filipson editions 2007 La Chute, Editions Filigranes 2006 Bobigny centre ville, avec Marie Desplechin, Editions Actes Sud 2004 A quatorze kilomètres d’Auxerre, Editions Atlantica 2004 Le ciel étoilé au-dessus de ma tête, Léo Scheer
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