Matthieu Gafsou: Only God can judge me

Matthieu Gafsou spent more than a year immersed in the lives of drug addicts. His photographs reveal the night, the moral abandon, and an altered reality. The portraits are noble, picturesque, far from the clichés the subject attracts; they reside alongside still lifes, allegorical landscapes, and abstractions. Together, they evoke a dark and poetic world where the function of photography is to render things as fantasy rather than to explain them.

Matthieu Gafsou lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland. After studying history and film esthetics, he studied photography at the School of Applied Arts in Vevey. Since 2006 he participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States. He received the famous Prix de la fondation HSBC pour la photographie in 2009 and was selected in the exhibition reGeneration2 in 2010, organized by the Musée de l’Elysée, which presents young and aspiring photographers from around the world. Since 2012 he teaches at the University of Art and Design Lausanne.