Gérard Uféras
Gérard Uféras
Biography
Gérard Uféras is born in Paris in 1954. Photography was an early vocation: from the age of eight, he was using the cameras his father collected. At eleven, accompanied by his two best friends, he decided to discover Paris through its museums. This two-year journey was to be the beginning of a passion for art that would never leave him and that would inform all his work. From 1984 onwards, he began working regularly with the newspaper Libération, for which he produced numerous reportages and which organised his first exhibition. He then published regularly in the French and international press. In 1986, he participated in the creation of the VU agency, before moving to the Rapho agency in 1993, where he met Willy Ronis, one of the authors who influenced his research along with Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész. He became a close friend of the great humanist photographer.
The Work
A music lover and theatre and opera fanatic, he has dedicated himself to his passions with long-term projects that have resulted in books and exhibitions, such as A Phantom at the Opera on Europe’s greatest opera houses and Un pas vers les étoiles on the Paris Opera Ballet. In 2010, the Paris d’Amour exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris attracted over 60.000 visitors. In 2011, he was invited to Moscow by the Bolshoi, together with Sarah Moon and Peter Lindbergh, to celebrate the reopening of the theatre after six years of renovation. Gérard Uféras’ work has won numerous awards and is regularly exhibited in French and international museums and institutions, including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and it is part of private and public collections. In 2023, he was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and his archive became part of the collections of the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie (MPP), which preserves the © Jean Turco photographic heritage of the French State.
