French photographer, born in 1988
Lives in Marseille
etiennedevillars.com
@edevillars
Project supported: MP#04 – La terre où l’heure est nue

Born in Nantes in 1988, Étienne de Villars is a French photographer living in Marseille. Halfway between documentary and sensitive research, his practice is a means of exploring worlds, both tangible and interior.
His work was the subject of his first book, Sur une voie silencieuse (Zoème, 2023), about the destruction of a housing estate in northern Marseille.
Trained as a musicologist, he also works for radio and teaches at the journalism school of the University of Aix-Marseille.

“La terre où l’heure est nue is an attempt to collect the traces and signs that bear witness to a desert inhabited by a presence as much human as immaterial.
The desert as main character, for a series of journeys without subject, to the sole test of an idea: the world is not only the one we see, but also the one we imagine.
Moving forward without script, without staging, focused first and foremost on “what’s there”. Photographing what seems banal and simple – forms, movements, presences, objects, landscapes – with the intuition that in the background lurks a mystery obscured by the wear and tear of our eyes.
In this tension, it’s less a question of asserting a truth or a point of view, than of finding a script, an arrangement of signs that make up a “spirit of place”.
The prospect of glimpsing, starting from reality, the existence of something absent.”