Stéphane Duroy, A3 Risograph Print for Fotokino

Again and Again, Stéphane Duroy’s solo exhibition at Le Bal in Paris, arrives at the right time in history. Having won several World Press Photo awards in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Duroy has become an integral voice in documentary photography, defined by books like Distress (2011) and L’Europe de Silence (1979–89). His artistic development culminates in Unknown (2007–17), an ongoing attempt to exhaust the documentary, artistic, and political possibilities of his work. Seeing Again and Again, the first comprehensive exhibition to present Duroy’s work, is like being taken by the hand on an impressionistic journey through the decline of Europe and the United States.


Duroy was born in 1948 in Tunisia, then a French colony, and his life coincides with the major moments of postwar European history. He took up photography in the late 1960s as a means to document national and international upheavals. But Duroy has shied away from exhibitions, instead preferring to share his vision in books that focus on political change in the ’70s in Great Britain, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Inspired by the writings of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner, Duroy’s theme is how “big” history—from World War I to the Holocaust to the end of Communism—is reflected in the daily lives of common people. The title of the exhibition, Again and Again, as well as the character of his work, underscores his historical fatalism. Duroy witnesses the societies of Thatcherite Great Britain, post-communist Eastern Europe, as well as contemporary America, in particular the downtrodden victims of capitalism’s excess, yesterday and today.

- Text by Wilco Versteeg for Aperture.com

Risograph Print produced by Fotokino
Size: A3
11.75 x 16.5 in
Signed by the artist.