Jean-Michel ANDRÉ

Chambre 207

“The children’s room was 207: I left my memory and my childhood there.”

With Chambre 207, Jean-Michel André pursues a photographic approach that blends politics and poetry, examining borders, memory and changes in the landscape. This project explores universal themes that run through all his work, such as absence, lack and the quest for reparation. In an autofictional vein, this work is based on a reinvented memory, born of a deep childhood trauma.

In this new series, the photographer delves into the memories of the night that turned his life upside down, and into the vanished memory of his father. Chambre 207 takes the form of a visual narrative, oscillating between ‘reconstitution and reconstruction’ as described by photography historian Clément Chéroux.

This exhibition, co-produced by the Institut pour la photographie and the Centre Méditerranéen de la photographie, relies on the power of symbol to tell the story of the tragic event that turned the artist’s life upside down.

Borders

The starting point of this work is the Calais Jungle in 2016. Jean-Michel André continued it over four years, in France, Italy, on the island of Lampedusa, in Spain, and in Tunisia.
Borders is conceived as a photographic collection composed of fragments of landscapes, portraits, and texts. Jean-Michel André invites the viewer on a journey—one of exile, wandering, but also of hope and resistance. Time is suspended, and spaces remain uncertain. By deliberately omitting the locations of his photographs, he erases the map, removing his work from a strictly documentary reading.

Awarded the Bourse du Talent 2017 in the Landscape category, the first part of his Borders series was exhibited at the Bibliothèque nationale de France from December 2017 to March 2018. Borders was later shown in Bordeaux as part of the Itinéraire des Photographes Voyageurs festival, at the Maison de la photographie de Lille (Transphotographiques Festival), and at the gallery of the Institut français de Tunis.

Thanks to the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques (Documentary Photography Support Grant from CNAP), and then of Diaphane, a photographic center in Hauts-de-France, he developed the second part of Borders from 2018 to 2020. This new phase was enriched through a collaboration with writer Wilfried N’Sondé. The work was published by Actes Sud and exhibited from July to September 2021 during the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles.

Works

Exhibitions

2025

Chambre 207

Galerie SIT DOWN, Paris

07.03.2025 17.05.2025

2022

Borders

Haute Photographie, Amsterdam

15.09.2022 – 18.09.2022

2021

Borders

Galerie SIT DOWN, Paris

05.11.2021 – 11.11.2021

Borders

Paris Photo 2021

11.11.2021 – 14.11.2021

Borders

Les Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles

04.07.2021 – 26.09.2021

Biography

Born in 1976, Jean-Michel André graduated in photography from the Gobelins school. For the past ten years, he has been developing a photographic practice at the crossroads of visual and documentary approaches. His work is driven by a political and poetic vision of territory, whose boundaries, memory, and evolutions he investigates. He also explores the notion of circulation, particularly concerning economic, financial, and migratory flows. Questions of absence, loss, and repair are among the central threads running through all his series.

Having spent much of his life outside mainland France—in Spain, on the African continent, or in the Caribbean—he acknowledges that travel enriches his work, without ever claiming to represent a country or its inhabitants. He prefers to take lesser-trodden paths: revealing shadows and inviting the exploration of an intimate geography.

In Dos à la mer, a series created in the Caribbean with the support of a 2010 creation grant from DRAC Martinique, he captures the collapse of a tourism-based development model. In L’autre pays (2010–2015), he embarks on an open-air archaeology of the aftermath of Spain’s housing bubble burst. With Borders (2016–2020), he creates tension between portraits and fragments of landscapes to question the notion of borders and their wounds. This work is accompanied by texts by Wilfried N’Sondé.

In 2021, Borders was published by Actes Sud and exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles, at Galerie Sit Down, and later at Paris Photo. In 2022, Jean-Michel André was among the winners of the “Grande commande photographique,” supported by the BnF and the French Ministry of Culture, for his project À bout de souffle, which received the Maison Blanche Prize in 2023.

Chambre 207, his new creation—awarded the prestigious 2024 Nadar Gens d’image Prize—was published by Actes Sud in October 2024 and exhibited at the Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse in Lille. This project was supported by the Centre national des arts plastiques, the Institut pour la photographie des Hauts-de-France, and the Centre méditerranéen de la photographie.

Jean-Michel André presents his work through exhibitions, residencies, and publications in France and abroad. His photographs are included in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Fondation Neuflize OBC, the Maison des Arts du Léman, and the Fondation Clément.