Softness, clarity, precision, an invitation to contemplation. These are Thibaut Cuisset’s tools for drawing in the viewer’s gaze.
— Michel Guerrin
Thibaut Cuisset devoted most of his work to the question of landscape. For more than thirty years, he travelled the world with a large-format camera, using slowness as a method to better absorb the places he encountered.
Immediately recognisable, his images patiently capture the specificities of each territory and their contemporaneity, whether untouched or inhabited. His gaze, his handling of light, his sense of reduction, his cinematic vision, and his affinity with painting produce an unmistakable “concentrate of place,” free of anecdote, pathos, human presence, or excessive colour. In most cases devoid of figures, Cuisset creates “portraits of landscapes,” whether in remote natural environments or within the identities of cities. With no compromise or slackness, he combines description with aesthetics, revealing the reality of place while conveying his emotional response to it.
In 2010, he received the Photography Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in 2015 he was awarded the Fondation des Treilles Photography Residency Prize. In 2017, his work was included in the major exhibition Paysages Français, Une aventure photographique, 1984–2017 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a landmark retrospective tracing thirty years of photographic missions across French territory.
His works are held in numerous collections, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou, the CNAP, the Fondation Neuflize / NSM Vie AMRO, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Société Générale, the Musée Malraux, the Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon, as well as public and private collections abroad.