Bio

Bastien Deschamps (Paris, 1990) is a photographer and visual artist. He lives and works in Montreuil, France.

After several years in the performing arts, he took to the road in 2015 and turned to photography full time. On a Wall Street Journal scholarship, he studied at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, graduating in 2019 from the Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program.

His work is rooted in documentary photography, understood not as a device for producing proof but as a tool for exploring the real. Early on, that approach becomes geopoetic: a visual language at the crossroads of the documentary, the experimental and the poetic, where the point is no longer only to describe but to make felt. Through immersion, long timeframes and closeness to places and to those who live in them, he approaches social questions at the level of raw feeling. He examines the power relations inscribed in landscapes, borders, rivers and marginal zones: wherever economic, ecological and social decisions leave their marks, visible and invisible, on bodies and territories.

That shift leads him to question the very materiality of the image. Support, process, physical transformation become carriers of meaning. Some projects thus weave together the documentary and the material, such as the work on clandestine gold mining in French Guiana, where the stakes tied to gold and mercury extend into chemical processes, the alteration of surfaces, the handling of unstable or toxic matter.

Since 2020 he has been developing Where the Border Runs: Tales from the River Sides, a long-term project in five chapters, each set along a different border river. The first, devoted to the Evros (Turkey/Greece), was published in 2024 by Éditions d'une rive à l'autre. He is currently at work on the second, along the Maroni in French Guiana.

Alongside this, his research around Le Poulpe au regard de soi(e) and the Swansong collective explores an antefuturist line of thought: photography as a ground of confrontation between the human gaze and the computed gaze, between the legacy of historical processes and contemporary technologies. Faced with the machine and with artificial intelligence, he mounts a radical critique of the technical systems that claim to represent the world, or to take its place. These two axes, one anchored in the political fractures of the real, the other in a critique of technological imaginaries, are in constant dialogue.

Between photographic wandering, material experiment and artist's books, he shapes forms where the sensory, the social and the political meet.