"Pierre Fenoyl was born on July 14, 1945 in the Rhone region in France. From a young age, passionate about photography, he worked as an archivist-photographer for news agencies Dalmas and Holmès-Lebel, then as a photo editor for the Rencontre publishing house. At the age of 20, he became Henri Cartier-Bresson's archivist. At the age of thirty, he is the first director of the National Foundation of Photography, created in Paris, and then, in 1978, he becomes the director of the photography section at the Georges-Pompidou Center, where he devoted himself especially to the promotion of photography as an independent means of expression. In 1984, winner of the Villa Medici grant, he travels to Egypt and his photos are presented at the Georges Pompidou Center. He withdraws, with his wife and two children, to Castelnau-de-Montmiral, in the Tarn department in France, where he produces, for the DATAR photographic mission, an exploration of the landscape in the Southwest of France. His photographs capture the subtle dialogues between the folds of the land, the houses, the plants, and create a mysterious harmony between the ground and the sky, in beautiful horizontal compositions. The same charm can be found in his Egyptian pictures that captured history's most legendary monuments. Beyond the brutal circumstances of his disappearance, Pierre Fenoyl is, among contemporary photographers, one of the most talented representatives of what is called in the US "Straight photography". Via Atlas of Places, Text via Artsper.
