Gilles Raynaldy (b. 1968) studied at the University of Paris 8 and the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. He lives and works in Paris and Rome.

Since the late 1990s, Gilles Raynaldy has been developing a photographic body of work centered on the representation of living and working spaces at the heart of our societies, in France and Italy. Through long-term projects, he has explored a school campus, a nursing home (EHPAD), a construction site, residential interiors, the Calais Jungle, and the peripheral neighborhoods of Rome. By photographing spaces and architecture, while closely observing the presences, faces, and gestures of those who bring them to life, he investigates through his work what constitutes a "place" of life. He gathers these large bodies of photographs, along with written testimonies, into books that he calls livres-lieux (book-places). Alongside this narrative flow, the autonomy of the photographs is essential to his approach. It is important to him that an image isolated from the documentary body to which it belongs can be understood and open up a space for contemplation—that it can stand on its own on a wall. Consequently, he attaches great importance to the exploration of form, photographic aesthetics, light, color, contrast, depth, internal balance, format, as well as the framing, which he crafts himself.

Belonging to a generation that experienced the transition from analog to digital photography, he leverages this position by exploring, questioning, and sometimes combining both technologies. He continues to shoot on film, in medium and large formats, printing his own photographs or collaborating with master printers. In parallel, he relies on digital capture and post-production tools to respond with precision and speed to his professional commissions. He regularly works for architects, companies, and the press, applying the same rigor to his commissioned work as to his artistic practice.

His work has received numerous grants and public or private commissions (including from the CNAP, Le Bal / Ministry of National Education, the Le Point du Jour art center, the documenta archiv in Kassel, and the Collège international de photographie). His photographs are included in major public and private collections, notably those of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), the Musée de Grenoble, the Antoine de Galbert collection, the Fonds communal de la ville de Marseille, the FRAC Normandie, and the collection départementale d’art contemporain de la Seine-Saint-Denis.