Member of Magnum Photos and the Institut de France (Académie des Beaux-Arts), and appointed “Peintre Officiel de la Marine” as both a photographer and filmmaker, Jean Gaumy was born in 1948 in Royan Pontaillac (Charente-Maritime), France.
In 1975, he began two in-depth projects on subjects that had never before been tackled in France: the first, L’Hôpital, published in 1976; the second, Les Incarcérés, focusing on French prisons, was published in 1983 and included excerpts from his personal diary written in the first person. In 1977, Jean Gaumy joined the Magnum agency.
In 1984, he directed his first film La Boucane, which was nominated for a César Award for Best Documentary in 1986. That same year, he began a series of winter voyages aboard traditional deep-sea trawlers, which continued until 1998 and led to the publication of Pleine Mer in 2001.
In 1987, he made the film Jean-Jacques, the result of two years of reporting in the town of Octeville-sur-Mer, where he lived, seen through the eyes of Jean-Jacques, a man wrongly regarded as the “village idiot.” In 1994, he directed his third film Marcel, prêtre, shot over several years in Raulhac, Cantal, and across the Auvergne region. Jean Gaumy received the prestigious Prix Nadar in both 2001 and 2010.
His many works on human confinement have in recent years been accompanied by a more contemplative photographic approach. In 2008, he began a photographic reconnaissance project that took him from the Arctic seas to the contaminated lands of Chernobyl, Ukraine. As part of the same project, he started work on the series D’après Nature, dedicated to mountain landscapes. Between 2010 and 2011, he again embarked aboard French nuclear submarines, part of the country’s nuclear deterrence program.
In 2020, after a stay in Niger, Gaumy spent two years documenting daily life as well as social and medical services during the Covid-19 crisis in the town where he lives, Fécamp, in Upper Normandy. Among other recent projects, he has been pursuing a series on the Cordouan lighthouse in Gironde – the oldest working lighthouse in the world, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021. Jean Gaumy’s work has been exhibited worldwide, and he has received numerous accolades, including being named “Peintre Officiel de la Marine” in 2008 and elected to the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France in 2018.
In 2025, he publishes Une certaine nature with Atelier EXB, the result of a project centered on Monet’s garden in Giverny. The same work is the subject of an exhibition at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny. That same year, the Musée national de la Marine in Paris dedicates a monographic exhibition to him, presenting over 140 prints from the collection of the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie.
