Olli Bery

“It is obvious that not everyone takes photographs, any more than everyone writes in the literary sense of the term writing."
- Paul Sonthonnax 1953

“You are the fragile and fierce grace that burns in each of these moments."
- MLN

This work was born from an epiphany on February 12, 2012.
Consider it as an explosive love letter, constructed like a musical score in which my emotional outbursts set the rhythm for the photographs and direct the procedures I use to respond to them.

Timelessness, the refusal of any form of acquired knowledge, modesty in the face of natural events, solitude, veneration of the common and the exploration of the familiar have allowed me to develop a sustained photographic language in which reality is unusual and recognizable.

The importance of modesty expressed by materials, shapes but also by the alteration of time and perspectives reveals my intimacy with the objects, places and people photographed.

These ruins are the living memory of all my failures,
A set of dried tears on exquisite papers.

The only clue is a delicately whispered question: DO YOU SEE THE BLUE?


"Olli Bery crosses photography as a warlord, certain battles bring him to the ground, the hope of a triumph makes him stand up: words proclaimed, images constantly replayed, traces preserved, it is the opera of the repair of beings that is put on stage.

Engravings, prints, experiments, each image like an illegitimate child plays its part then returns to form one body in installations which evoke the heritage of the avant-gardes with its relics and fetishes.

Counter-culture, personal mythology, incandescence of existence, delicacy of impressions, Olli Bery's way of implementing photography is akin to the description of a fight."

- Michel Poivert, Historian of photography, Paris Panthéon Sorbonne


Olli Bery is accompanied by SIGMA France, SIGMA Japon, Blackprint (CH), Éric Levert (NL), La Scattiera (Italy), LENEUF Sinibaldi (Paris), Otto Gallery (BE)