Étienne Perrone is a French photographer, filmmaker, and composer. Trained as a director of photography, he worked for thirty years in moving images and music before choosing photography as his primary medium of creation. This shift is not a rupture but a continuity: his images carry the rigor of cinema, the rhythm of electronic music, and the intensity of visual storytelling.
For more than twenty years, he has walked alone through cities around the world, most often at night. It is a ritual: wandering for hours, waiting for the light to shift, seizing the instant when reality fractures. His photographs do not show the city as it is, but as it appears when the world sleeps and silence takes back the space. Always devoid of human presence, his works turn the ordinary into fiction: a shop window, a staircase, a parking lot become scenes of a silent cinema.
A key element of his practice is the use of colored light—flash or even a simple flashlight—to disrupt the nocturnal urban landscape. With one stroke of artificial color, a familiar place becomes uncanny, estranged, almost otherworldly. This simple gesture creates a portal to a parallel reality, where architecture and shadow shift into fiction. Many viewers believe these surreal hues are added in post-production, but they are in fact created on site, at the very moment of capture.
His approach is uncompromising. Each image is framed with rigor, refined in depth, cleaned of distracting elements, polished to balance. Étienne does not embellish—he reveals. He describes his works as “archaeologies of silence”: urban fragments sculpted by light, where strangeness and poetry rise from the shadows.
Since 2024, he has fully embraced photography as his main medium. His strategy is clear: to produce little, but with strength. His prints are rare (often 3 editions only), in very large format, produced on high-end supports (Hahnemühle paper, alu-dibond, wooden floating frame). He refuses the logic of volume, choosing rarity and value instead. To collect his work today is to enter early into a journey that has only just begun—with the certainty of aesthetic, technical, and emotional coherence.
Étienne has already exhibited in France, Dubai, the Emirates, Beijing and Shenzhen, and sold series to prestigious collectors and institutions such as Kevin Barry Fine Art in Los Angeles. He has been published in international magazines and is gaining growing visibility. Yet he considers himself still at the beginning of the path.
His goal is clear: to pursue his nocturnal wanderings in Asia, the United States, and beyond, to create ever rarer images, and to share this singular vision through exhibitions, selective sales, and curated collaborations.
Étienne Perrone’s photography is not decorative—it is immersive. These are images to inhabit, doors opening to a silent, luminous elsewhere. A demanding, rare body of work, anchored in time, whose value can only grow.
