Joël Denot French, b. 1961

Joël Denot was born in Rennes (France), in 1961. Buying his first camera at the age of 16 was a turning point in his life, leading to the fashioning and discovery of the world of images. He became first a studio photographer, then a photojournalist, in 1980s Paris. Suffering from depression in 1993, he locked himself away and started taking photos of a white interior wall. He established his procedure right from the start: he would make a series of some thirty photographs a year of a white interior wall using natural light and one-off prints. Each series was the result of long deliberation on notes regarding the lighting conditions, the history of photography (and art in general), and on his life in the various places he lived. Joël Denot now lives in southern France and has followed the same procedure for the past thirty years.