Artist Statement
Emotions have always been the motivating forces throughout my life and my creative process. In the winter of 2002, I began documenting the lives of French family farmers living and working in the Forez region. I have always had a deep affection for this land in which I was born and lived until age 16. I traveled to the lesser-known parts of this bucolic land, where I felt inspired by the silence I found and moved by the authenticity and charisma of the people I encountered.
With time and through a gradual process of building trust and friendship, they accepted my curious eye and allowed me to photograph and film their daily existence. I wanted to go beyond documenting their labor-intensive lives and present a deeper, more intimate portrait of their nature. This large body of work is to me a meditation on life and death and the silence and solitude that seem ever-present in our lives…
Since the early 1990s, Christophe Agou has been building up a body of compelling photographs that take an allusive approach to the human condition. He is noted for his intimate and personal documentary-style black-and-white and colour photographs. Christophe had extended his expression into other media, always working intuitively, making assemblages and short films.
Self-taught photographer, Christophe Agou grew up in a small town in the Forez region. He moved to New York in 1992 where he developed a love for the city and for photography. He began making photographs in the streets and within that work he evoked a sense of longing and isolation. He first came to prominence with his powerful photographs made in the New York City Subway, and published Life Below in 2004 (Quantuck Lane Press / W.W. Norton & Company).
Agou's work is held in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Musée d'Art Roger Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Akron Art Museum, Akron; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona;The New-York Historical Society; The New York Public Library, and La Fnac, France.
In 2006, he was chosen as a finalist for both the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Award, and for le Prix de la Photographie de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2008. He received a ‘Mention Spéciale‘ for Le Prix Kodak de la Critique Photographique in 2009. In 2010, Christophe Agou won the prestigious European Publishers Award for Photography for his project Face au Silence.
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