Jean-Christian Bourcart

Who is Jean-Christian Bourcart?

After a career as photojournalist, Jean-Christian Bourcart first gained attention in the art world, for "Infertile Madonnas", a series of photographs taken in Frankfurt brothels, which was widely exhibited and also published with an introduction by Nan Goldin. He has been living and working in New York since 1997.

He also published "Forbidden City", an investigation of swinging and S&M clubs shot with a hidden camera; "Traffic," a study of commuters caught in traffic jams; and "Sinon la mort te gagnait", an autobiography mixing text and photographs. His last bodies of works include "Stardust," in which he photographed the image on the glass that separates the projection room from the audience in movie theaters, and "Collateral", in which he projected photographs of Iraqi war victims on houses, churches and supermarkets in the American countryside. In 2010, he shot his second feature movie “Memories of the days to come”, a sci-fi thriller in New York art world, starring the awards-winner Elodie Bouchez. In 2009, he documented Camden, NJ, which is one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the U.S. Bourcart tried to understand and witness what is the real life behind the statistics. Camden was published by Images en Manoeuvre as a bilingual book which won the Nadar prize for best photographic book in France in November 2011. From 2009, he develops "I shot the crowd", a work on human crowds. While traveling through major cities in the world, he records the uninterrupted flows of people and questions the interactivity between them as individual and crowds.