Gregory Herpe - Photographer

Biography

Born in Paris in 1969, Grégory Herpe is a fine art photographer, photojournalist and humanitarian

photographer. The nephew of painter Pierre-Jacques Catoni, he lived in Belgium, the Netherlands,

Spain and Africa before settling back in Paris in 2020.

He first trained at the Cours Florent, in Francis Huster’s class, alongside Jean-Paul Rouve, Édouard

Baer, Jeanne Balibar, Valérie Bonneton and Éric Ruf, among others. He became an actor and stage

director, then a journalist for NRJ, Fun Radio and Fun TV in Paris, RTL-TVI in Brussels, and numerous

magazines. He is the author of several books.

A press card holder, he is distributed by Sopa Images (Hong Kong), after working with Polaris Images (New York), and his work

appears in magazines worldwide. He focuses on people living on the margins and on fragile ecosystems, with particular attention to human rights and environmental impact.

His series include:

• Children of Cambodia, about girls rescued from trafficking and child prostitution, for the NGO Toutes à l’école;

• Children Beyond the War, with Ukrainian war orphans across the country;

• Volunteer Surgeons in Cambodia, following volunteer surgeons into the operating room;

• Belfast – I.R.A. Still Alive, with I.R.A. fighters in Northern Ireland;

• Christians of Lebanon, on the forgotten Christians of Beirut;

• The Street Children of Cairo, who survive however they can in Egypt;

• Deep into Drag Queens, across Europe, from Finland to Romania;

• I’m the Gitano, more than ten years alongside the Roma community of Perpignan, exhibited at the European Parliament;

• After the War – Karabakh, the war and its aftermath in devastated Nagorno-Karabakh.

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In Africa, he photographs endangered species such as lions and gorillas, threatened by deforestation, poaching and human

expansion. He has also photographed major figures from rock and cinema, including David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Björk, Sofia Coppola, Deep Purple, Omar Sharif and Gérard Depardieu, among many others, as well as Pope Francis.

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He works with many NGOs and teaches photography to war orphans and social orphans in Moldova, Romania, Myanmar and Iraq.

He then exhibits their images alongside his own. In June 2024, he co-directed his first documentary, Children Beyond the War, with

his son Arthur Herpe. The film was selected for several international festivals, from the United Kingdom to Nigeria, and won the Audience Award at the Lift-Off Global Network Festival (Pinewood Studios).

In 2026, he is leading workshops with SOS Children’s Villages in Ukraine and running a phototherapy project in an underground

school in Kharkiv.

His work has been shown in nearly 200 exhibitions, including two at the European Parliament. These were held in museums and

galleries in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Kyiv, Zurich, Brussels, New York, Boston and San Diego, as well as in

South Korea, India, Nigeria and Iran. His work is held in permanent collections in Monaco, New York, Zurich and Paris.

As a lecturer, he presents “The Iconic Images of Photojournalism” in around ten countries.

 

In 2026, he founded Midnight Express Magazine, a free, ad-free, English-language photography magazine, and serves as its editor-in-chief.

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Statement

For me, photography is not a profession, nor even a passion. It is my breath. I don’t practice it from time to time: I live through it. Wherever I am, I am scanning my surroundings, and the camera simply extends a gaze that never stops.

Before becoming a photographer, I was an actor. On stage, I learned what presence is, what silence is, how tension builds.

I never left the theatre; I took it with me.

My images are built like scenes.

There is light, a frame that serves as a stage, characters, and a dramaturgy: something is happening, has just happened, or is about to happen. Cinema shaped me just as much. I think in shots, in depth of field, in what lies beyond the frame.

To me, a successful photograph holds an entire story in a fraction of a second.

What matters most is emotion. If I feel nothing when I press the shutter, whoever looks at the image will feel nothing either.

I am not looking for the perfect image, because it doesn’t exist. I am looking for the true image, the one that moves through me

before it moves through others.

Black and white is my natural language: high-contrast and deep, with dense blacks.

It strips away distraction and keeps only the essential, which is the truth, however raw.

Yet I don’t forbid myself colour. When a scene exists only through colour, I let it speak.

And I never crop: what is in the frame is what I saw, at the moment I saw it.

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This way of seeing has taken me to places where people are put to the test: Ukraine, Lebanon, Nagorno-Karabakh, Iraq, Myanmar, Cambodia, and, closer to home, the Roma community of Perpignan. There I look for what the theatre taught me to recognise: the greatness of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I mean the dignity of a gaze amid the ruins, the tenderness of a gesture in

a displacement camp, the resilience of childhood.

Children are at the heart of my work. With them, I don’t just photograph; I pass something on.

I run workshops with war orphans in Ukraine, Myanmar, Iraq and Moldova.

Putting a camera in their hands gives them back the chance to tell their own story.

A share of the proceeds from my series goes to the organisations that support them.

My gaze does not stop at people. I am deeply concerned by the upheavals our planet is going through.

This is why, in Africa and Asia, I also photograph endangered species: lions, gorillas, rhinos.

I approach them with the same care I give to people, without folklore or exoticism, seeking their presence, their nobility, their

fragility. These are portraits, and sometimes perhaps the last testimonies of a world that is fading away.

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Photojournalism and fine art photography are often set against each other. I have never understood that divide.

An image born in the field can, and must, go beyond the news that gave rise to it and become a work that lasts.

That is what I seek with every shot: to capture life at its most fragile and its most resilient, and to make these images move people, endure, and make a difference.

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Prints

My fine art prints are produced in strictly limited editions of 1, 3 or 8.

Each is signed, numbered and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

All are printed on Hahnemühle Natural Line Hemp 290 gsm, a paper made with 60% hemp.

Its natural white tone and fine texture serve both the depth of my blacks and the delicacy of my colours.

This choice is also a commitment: it seemed impossible to photograph a threatened world without caring about the footprint

of my own images.

Each print is an image that was lived before it was seen, and that lives on in the space of whoever takes it in.