F. Le Diascorn

“There exists another world but it is here in this one.”

Paul Eluard

Nothing in François Le Diascorn’s background indicated the artistic road he was ultimately to follow (rather, he was directed toward a safe and prosperous future via the Institut d’Etudes Politiques by his professor father) except for the sense he often had of the dream-like nature of existence, of its unreality. As a child he believed the world had come from his own thoughts and that if he stopped thinking about it, it could disappear! But his destiny swerved as a result of a trip to Egypt when he was about 17 and with a subsequent trip to India in 1969 and a return trip in 1971, trips which stimulated a budding passion: to try to capture in images that dream-like nature of existence he’d always been conscious of as a child — thus keeping the world real by his vision of it.

He has always chosen his own photographic subjects — which means he has accepted a certain rigor of existence — such absolute dedication to one’s work, the work of recreating the world according to the artist’s vision of it — is often a solitary road and so his has been. François Le Diascorn’s rigorously composed photography is a work of love and necessity, and whether considered fashionable or not, whether materially remunerative, he continues to unceasingly travel the world, photographing whatever he meets of interest on the road but with a predilection for certain subjects: magical animals, creatures of the oceans, Buddha and Christ, angels and demons, hospitals and carnivals, trees and tree people, children and clouds, monks and shepherds, his fetish cities and countries Paris, Venice, Sète, Varanasi, Egypt, India, Greece. It is through his third camera eye that François Le Diascorn tries to understand the how and why of existence, particularly his own, through capturing and transmitting the beauty and the strangeness he encounters. His life is a never-ending journey which leads him from one waking dream to another : solitary quest of the transparent and fugitive messages of the world.

François’ style of photography is becoming a lost art. He never alters or crops his photos after shooting his subjects. The perfect framing of a precise moment in time is what gives his work its authenticity, its poetry, and its magic.
He has received a number of awards and grants for his work, among them a national grant for research and creation (for a year in the United States) and a Leonardo da Vinci grant (for a project in Japan). His photographs have been shown in museums and galleries in Europe and the United States and are in a number of collections including that of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the French National Center of Plastic Arts, the European Center for Photography in Paris (MEP), le Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Châlon-sur-Saône, the Réattu Museum in Arles, the Carnavalet Museum in Paris and numerous private collections. In 2006, some of his vintage photos were sold in the auction sale Trésors des Photographes (Photographers’ Treasures) by ARTCURIAL in Paris.

At the end of the 1970s, François Le Diascorn joined the reknown photo agency VIVA which from its inception and for the few years it existed included some of the great names of French photography (Guy Le Querrec, Hervé Gloaguen, Martine Franck, Claude Raimond-Dityvon, François Hers, William Klein.) He has been a member of the RAPHO Agency (now Gamma-Rapho) since 1986.

François Le Diascorn is an artist who has not bowed to digital photography but continues to shoot black and white and colour with 35mm cameras he has used all his life. He does his own black and white printing on silver-bromide paper. He captures moments that occur in reality but require an uncanny eye to see and a great talent to capture. Authentic fine art photography by an authentic artist.