Nicolas Henry
Born in 1978 in Paris, France
Lives and works in Paris
In parallel to a career in scenography and lighting design for theatre, Nicolas Henry travelled the world as film director for the project “6 Billion Others”, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. He took on the role of artistic director for the exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Curious about others, the artist defines himself as a storyteller, adopting the maxim of Théodore Monod: “I am the bonds that I establish”.
For him, photography is a pretext to create aesthetic work that strikes powerful emotion. It is also, and essentially, a pretext to tell stories.
So, in 2010, he undertook a series of portraits of the world’s ancestors, which he gathered into a book, Les cabanes de nos grands-parents, published by Editions Actes Sud in 2011. From the Andes to Japan, by way of Jordan, Russia, or Papua New Guinea, Nicolas Henry takes us to the far corners of the globe, inside vast cities or remote locations, to meet grandparents from around the world.
Later, he pursued this approach by creating images that he gathered in Contes imaginaires autour du monde - Worlds in the making, published in 2016 by Editions Albin Michel. Nicolas Henry received the Prix Méditerranée du livre d’art for this book in 2017.
Nicolas Henry’s stagings are not in any way journalistic. The artist constructs a ragman’s world of baroque, building a set composed of found objects and recycled elements.
The construction of the space of the image is inspired by the realm of childhood, inferring symbolic elements: a carpet becomes the sea, a bottle is a mountain, etc., limited only by the artist’s imagination. Nicolas Henry’s imagination is on display as he creates his framework as a painter constructs his painting. He stages the stories of the people he meets along the journey. He takes us along as he travels the world.
Nicolas Henry's works are regularly shown in the media and are part of many private collections. He also participates in many institutional projects around the world.