Yannick Cormier was born in 1975 in France. In 1999 he joined the studio Astre in Paris. During this period he worked
as an assistant for Patrick Swirc, William Klein and many others for magazines such as Vogue, Flair, Elle, Vanity Fair.
Then he began a career as a documentary photographer and his images have been published in various international
magazines (OjodePez, Courrier international, Libération, The sunday guardian, Le Nouvel Observateur, The Hindu, CNN
, etc...). In spring 2018, he moved to France, after 15 years spent in India. In 2021, he published the books
Tierra Magica with Éditions Light Motiv and Dravidian Catharsis with Éditions Le Mulet.
The photographer reveals this form of resistance of cultural identity by traditional societies or smaller communities
who have not as yet been completely anaesthetised by the modern consumerist world. It is an attempt to glimpse at
the mythical attitudes of these groups. But more than myths, these images show people playing with symbols of a
culture that is at ease with its traditions and hence can be self-mocking.
His photography evokes the spiritual and the material, fiction and reality, tradition and modernity. His photographs
are living images that he discovers in travel, in social rituals, in religious ceremonies, in cultural fantasies, in personal
dreams and more generally in all the games, sacred or ordinary, that distorts identity and appearance.
https://yannickcormier.com/
Text: Yannick Cormier
Voice: Peter Lee (AI)
