Denis Dailleux never steals a photograph. The human being is at the heart of his work and either he enters into a relationship with those who will become his models, or he waits, as he nicely says, for the “images to present themselves to me”.

He went to Cairo because of a love story and discovered a city and a country that he never stopped photographing for thirty years. The love story eventually ended and it was summarized in a large book, Misr, published last year. He began photographing in black and white, carrying on the work he had begun in France, making portraits of close people, of his family, of the inhabitants of his village, of a neighborhood. Then came color, which has not left him since. A subtle color, always in ambient light, which allows him, in the square format he favors, harmonious compositions in which the characters offer themselves to us. He thus transforms a city that is said to be dusty into a series of luminous paintings, a beautiful scene for each people.

Denis Dailleux essentially photographed the common people, the ordinary people of a disproportionate capital with more than ten million inhabitants, more than double for the agglomeration. In the street, in cafes, in people's homes, he waited as a respectful visitor for the images to be within reach of his gaze. Photographs that dialogue perfectly with those he made later in Kolkata, at the Malik Ghat market, which was built in 1855 and is the largest flower market in India.

Denis Dailleux was born in 1958 in Angers (France). He now lives in Paris. While working in Egypt, he regularly travels to Ghana where he explores new relationships to the body and to space, to life and death, to the community, to the sea, which open up new perspectives in his photographic research. More recently he has started working in India.

Regularly exhibited and published in the national and international press, his work has been published in different personal books, both color and black and white, all available at the library of IFC. Denis Dailleux is also the winner of prestigious awards including a World Press Photo – Staged Portraits category for his series “Mother and Son” in 2014, and in 2019 the Roger Pic Prize awarded by the Scam for his series “In Ghana – We shall meet again”. Member of the VUʼ Agency (Paris), he is represented by the Camera Obscura gallery (Paris), the 127 Gallery (Marrakech) and the Peter Sillem Gallery (Frankfurt).