About

I am Hélène Havard, a French photographer and graduate of EFET in Paris. After living in France, England and Canada, I settled in French Polynesia, where I now live and work.

My work explores the relationships between territories and those who inhabit, move through or discover them. I am interested in the ways a place ( its history, geography, isolation or the particular conditions that shape it )  influences ways of living, behaviours and imaginaries.

Through landscapes, built environments, and traces or fragments of human presence, I observe what places reveal about those who move through them, but also what we project onto them. My photographs move between observation and interpretation, reality and imagination.

Light, colour, grain and silence are at the heart of my visual language. They allow me to translate the particular atmosphere of places and explore that uncertain space where reality can become memory, dream or a construction of the imagination.

Whether I am photographing a territory I have just discovered or a place I have known for years, I approach it both as a space to observe and understand, and as a mental landscape. I am interested in what remains, what changes, and in what the presence  or absence of people can reveal about a place, as well as in the ways landscapes and human lives shape one another.

Alongside my personal artistic practice, I have developed a pioneering approach to wedding photography, becoming the first to introduce aerial photography as a genuine photographic language within the field. This new perspective, which extends some of the concerns explored in my personal work around landscape, space and point of view, has opened up another way of representing weddings and has since received international recognition.