Guy Hersant

Guy Hersant
in Teshie, Ghana. 2010
Nationality	France
Known for	Photography

Guy Hersant (born 1949) is a French photographer.

Born in Loire Atlantique (France), Guy Hersant entered apprenticeship at the age of sixteen and obtained his CAP in photography while working as an assistant for several photographers. He later opened his own studio in Lorient in 1975. There he concentrated on portraits and reporting until 1990.

He went to Africa for the first time in 1971, where he was an assistant in a studio run by a Frenchman in Bamako). It was the beginning of a personal photography, the revelation of the taste for traveling and the passion for Africa.

He co-founded the collective of Brittany photographers "Sellit" in 1979. He created in 1982, and managed until 1989, the meetings of the photography in Brittany, then the gallery Le Lieu in Lorient. Afterward, Guy Hersant settled in Paris and photographed architecture. He travelled again in West Africa and made photographic series of the valleys of the river Niger.

He co-led the African Photography Encounters from 1994 until 2001. He has conducted research, wrote and published on the photography of studio and itinerant photographers in Africa, contributing to awareness of the works of these photographers.

In 1995, he began a series of photos of groups in the forest of Crécy (Somme, France) which began the spirit of the project Please do not move! that began in Kano (Nigeria) on the instigation of the Alliance française of this city in 2000. The project was to develop in the following years in France in Amiens, Le Touquet, Mulhouse; in Libreville (Gabon),Gao (Mali), and in January, 2010 in association with Jean-Michel Rousset and Eric Adjetey Anang in Teshie (Ghana). It is this work which confirmed the vision, at the same time documentary and human, which crossed the whole work of the photographer.