Yan Morvan

Yan Morvan (born April 4, 1954) is a French photographer, journalist, photojournalist and author particularly recognized for his war photography and images of underground communities.

His career, which began in 1974, has specialized in examining the underside of the society, his photographs have depicted the lives of underground communities, such as bikers, far right and far left activists, gangs, and sex workers.

In 1974, he published his first photograph in the French daily newspaper Liberation.

Freelance writer for the Fotolib agency, he was the first to document the life of rockers and bands.

His first book, Le Cuir et Le Baston, published by Simoen editors, is a sociological work on the aspiration of generation of teenagers obsessed by the American rock 'n' roll culture.

His style, as close as possible to reality, testifies, without judgment to the marginal lives of this generation under American influence.

In February 1978, he joined the teams of French magazine Paris Match, then Figaro Magazine, followed by the Gamma agency in 1979 and Sipa between 1980 and 1988.

He has covered a number of major conflicts from 1980 and 2000 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Alternating press reports and long formats coverage, Yan Morvan found himself in London with the rise of the Punk movement in 1980.

He then left for Bangkok photographing the Cambodian refugees fleeing the Khmer there.

Yan and his camera witnessed the sexual slavery of Thai peasants.

The subsequent report appeared in Photo magazine.

In July 1980, he joined the Sipa Agency team, gradually asserting himself through a few subjects: Turkey, the Iran-Iraq war, the North Irish conflict as well as Lady Diana's wedding.

His treatment of the conflict is without bias, he wishes to faithfully reproduce the episodes of this major conflict of the 1980s.

He decides to produce a poignant report in the Linhof Technika 4 x 5 large format camera along the Green Line, this no man's land which separates Beirut and the belligerents.

There, he photographs combatants, civilians and ruins.

This exceptional photographic, historical and ethnological work almost cost him his life on numerous occasions.

His photographic equipment was heavy and ill-suited to this type of terrain, but allowed the world to fully bear witness to the situation.

He won two World Press Photo and a mention for the Robert Capa Award.

The intervention of the Israeli army in Lebanon in June 1982 marked the start of Operation Peace in Galilee.

Yan Morvan was dispatched there by the Sipa agency for Newsweek and will remains for four years in Lebanon.

In the 1990s, Yan Morvan created with Patrick Frilet the EMI-CFD and, with Jean-François Bauret and Didier de Fays, the first French photography magazine on the internet: Photographie.com as well as the Talent Award.

He also collaborated with Thierry Ardisson from the beginning of the magazine Entrevue and the rise of the chic porn industry.

Co-director of the photojournalism section of the center for training and development of journalists in 1994, co-founder of the magazine Photographie.com in 1997, independent photojournalist since 1998, Morvan has been published extensively in French and international press.

Yan Morvan covered conflicts for the international press (Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, until Bosnia in 1999) and substantive topics on gangs, the amplification of the social divide.

He was taken hostage and tortured for three weeks by serial killer Guy Georges in Paris.

The 2000s began with the release of the book Gang, Editions Marval, a retrospective of thirty years of photographic work.

In 2004, the Battlefields project began, which lasted ten years.

Equipped with a 20x25 Deardorff camera, Yan Morvan photographs the battlefields in France, Europe, America, Asia, Africa and the Pacific Ocean.

Since 2005, he has focused on photographic projects (Battlefields, Hexagone) and exhibited in photo festivals.

Additionally he is the author of some twenty books.

After his graduation in mathematics then a master's degree in cinema at the University of Vincennes, Yan Morvan turned to photography.

In 2012 and 2016, two books, Gang Story and Blousons Noirs, were published by Éditions La Manufacture de livres, testimonies to the evolution of gangs, then Yan Morvan undertook the Hexagone project with photographer Éric Bouvet.

He crisscrossed France in order to portray the French with his camera.

The following year, Bobby Sands (ed. André Frère) was released, which won the Hip Prize and was exhibited at Visa pour l'image, Les Années de fer (ed. Serious Publishing) and Battlefield, an American version of Champs de guerre published by Abbeville.

The following year will be marked by his first solo exhibition at Paris Photo (Sit Down gallery).

In 2015, a 660-page book was published by Photosyntheses editions and brought together 250 battlefields photographed and commented by Yan Morvan.

The series is exhibited at the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles in 2016 and will enter the collection of the French Army Museum.

In 2020, Yan Morvan exhibits, as part of the Rencontres d'Arles, an introduction to the Hexagone project, publishes his story on the Pigalle of the 1990s (ed. La Manufacture de livres) and presented at the Auer Photo Foundation in Geneva.

2021 marks the anniversary of 1981, a photographic coverage of the election of François Mitterrand which will give rise to several exhibitions (Marlat gallery, Initial Labo, place de la Bastille and the François-Mitterrand Institute).