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 building a photographic body of work around 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 secondary school complex, a nursing home, a construction site, domestic interiors, the Calais Jungle and the outlying neighborhoods of Rome. Photographing spaces and architecture, and observing just as closely the presences, faces and gestures of those who bring them to life, he questions what makes a space a lived-in “place.” His projects are built with the people who inhabit these places, who are involved in the work all the way to its presentation. He gathers these large bodies of photographs, along with written testimonies, into books he calls livres-lieux (book-places). He conceives his exhibitions as the creation of a space and of a relationship between the viewer and the images: posters pasted up across an entire school, a hanging in an art center, posters in a school in Leipzig, or a table on which the contact prints of his Roman landscapes are laid out.

Belonging to the generation that lived through the shift from film to digital, he makes the most of this position by exploring both technologies, moving from one to the other and sometimes combining them within a single project. He continues to shoot on film, in medium and large format, printing his own color and black-and-white photographs or working with master printers; he also practices digital capture and post-production.

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