Hans Silvester regularly opens his archives and selects his most beautiful images to share with you. Presented full-page, with little text, by theme and in small series, they change regularly. It’s up to you to keep an eye out for them if you’re hungry for their beauty, for the pleasure of your eyes.
About Hans Silvester:
From an early age, Hans Silvester, born in 1938 in Lörrach, Germany, had a passion for photography. In 1960, he arrived in the Camargue and enjoyed his first success with a report on horses, accompanied by texts by Jean Giono. Having fallen in love with the region, the photographer moved to Provence.
From then on, he traveled the world, taking images that testified to his curiosity and his talent for capturing the truth… In 1965, he joined the Rapho agency as a photojournalist, and it was in 1977 that he made the first cover of the first issue of the magazine Géo.
Throughout his life as a photographer, Hans Silvester collected an impressive number of images, all bearing his signature: from petanque to birds, horses (for which he won an award at the Leipzig Book Fair), cats, scarecrows, flying deer, local customs… in countries all over the world.
The 80s marked his commitment to the environment: he published reports devoted to Europe’s nature parks, denounced the ravages of deforestation in Amazonia, produced a long report on the Calavon river in Provence and finally took an interest in forest exploitation in North America. Since the early 2000s, he has been traveling through southern Ethiopia, meeting the peoples of the Omo valley and surrounding mountains.
These testimonies and the beauty of his photos of these exceptional peoples have earned him international recognition and great success. His work is exhibited in the world’s leading museums and galleries, as well as at photography festivals around the world.
In December 2022, Hans Silvester was awarded the Prix International Planète Albert Kahn for his life’s work and for his photographs of an era from 1960 to the present day. Thanks to his openness to the world, the acuity of his photographic eye and his sense of beauty, he brings us iconic images of everyday people, witnesses to a culture, a place, a moment… The photographer’s eye freezes an ephemeral moment to remind us of what constitutes our history. As such, he is at once an artist, a sociologist, a historian, a defender of culture and nature through an approach based on trust and observation.
The signature of this formidable observer lies in his ability to immerse himself in the subjects that fascinate him, the time he spends on them (years), his integration into so many different worlds, all of which have accepted him, integrated him, offered themselves to his gaze.