Portfolio
b. 1947 Paris. France
François-Marie Banier is a prolific photographer as well as a wellknown playwright and novelist. Since the 1970s he has captured the world’s social, literary, theatrical, fashion, and political scenes, from Vladimir Horowitz and Samuel Beckett to Silvana Mangano, Yves Saint Laurent, and Johnny Depp. This heady mix is leavened by the tough, penetrating, and highly empathic portraits he takes of anonymous yet unforgettable street people, whose faces, bodies, stances, and expressions bear witness to the inexorable march of time and fate. Banier also combines his various activities in single works, writing and painting on the surface of large-format black and white photographs. Taking photographs and writing are, for him, interdependent practices. Rendering images as diaries or poems is perhaps a way of prolonging and intensifying the al -too-brief moment of the photograph itself. He lives and works in Paris.
