Grace and Fire – Villa Tamaris, France

Gerard Uferas

Born in Paris in 1954, Gérard Uféras is a French photographer. Photography was an early vocation for him: from the age of eight, the young boy used the cameras his father collected. At the age of eleven, accompanied by his two best friends, he decided to discover Paris through its museums. This two-year journey marked the beginning of a passion for art that would never leave him and would permeate all his work.  
From 1984, he began a regular collaboration with the newspaper Libération, for which he produced numerous reports and which organized his first exhibition. He then published regularly in the French and international press. In 1986, he participated in the creation of the Vu agency, an agency of authors, then joined the Rapho agency in 1993 where he met Willy Ronis, one of his first influences along with Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész. He formed a deep friendship with the great humanist photographer.  

A music lover, mad about theatre and opera, he devotes himself to his passions with long-term projects that have resulted in books and exhibitions, such as A Phantom at the Opera on the greatest opera houses in Europe, or A Step to the Stars on the ballet of the Paris National Opera. These projects earned him an invitation to Moscow in 2011 by the legendary Bolshoi Theatre, which gave him carte blanche, like his peers Sarah Moon and Peter Lindbergh, to celebrate its reopening after six years of work. The previous year, his exhibition Paris d’Amour, organised at the Hôtel de Ville in the capital, had welcomed more than 60,000 visitors. Having won several awards and regularly exhibited in prestigious venues in France and abroad, such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Gérard Uféras’ works are featured in numerous private and public collections.  

In 2023, he was named a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, and his entire work entered the collections of the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie (MPP), which preserves the photographic heritage of the French State. Steeped in culture, always sensitive and with a rigorous formal composition, his photos contain a knowing generosity that knows how to avoid mockery or cynicism. Uféras never cheats, a bit like his friend Willy Ronis who wrote of his work: “We would like to use a very strong word, but we don’t dare, so we say that we are before the great mystery called Grace.”