Stéphane Duroy

French photographer, member of the VU’ Agency since its inception, lives in Paris.
First a press photographer, Stéphane Duroy gradually moved away from reportage to question the relationship to the history of a 20th century Europe marked by two atrocious wars, in an approach that is both documentary and conceptual, with a sobriety of means that prohibits both the spectacular and the anecdotal.
"From 1977 to 2002, Stéphane undertook a vast photographic investigation into British society whose social divisions, very marked, illustrate the complexity of a human community.
West Berlin from 1979 imposed itself as the link of cause and effect, the place where the main directions that generated the European tragedy and questioned our dear values were decided.
Finally, from 1984, the United States magnificent symbol of hope, great ready-made dream in which no one believes, closes the circle.

This obsessive journey today forms a closed theater foreshadowing the chain of our behaviors, group survival, power and its struggles, failure, bitterness, rejection, and flight finally, a mixture of sincere hope and duplicity. This profound and disillusioned reflection on a deaf and desolate Europe gives rise to an important corpus of monographs.
In 2017, ten years after the publication of his book Unknown, Filigranes published Unknown #2– The endless Reworking of a book, thus marking a formal evolution initiated in 2009: “Collages, press clippings, anonymous photographs, paintings, erasures and tears, come to feed and mistreated dozens of copies of his book Unknown. By this daily gesture of destruction and reconstruction, by the addition of successive layers of materials, (...) this attempt to exhaust the book and its own images allows Stéphane Duroy to go beyond his photography, to break its codes and to explore new territories of expression. "(Fannie Escoulen)

Stéphane Duroy's work integrates prestigious private and public collections (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Maison Européenne de la Photographie) and is regularly the subject of exhibitions, including "Collapse", a major retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la photographie in 2002, or "Again and Again" at the Bal (Paris) in 2017, Gallery VU (Paris) in 2019 and Les Rencontres de la Photographie (Arles) in 2024.