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.
