BIOGRAPHY
For the past twenty years Cyril le Tourneur d'Ison has travelled the world, bringing back images that document places and people while at the same time testifying to what is happening in the world. He turned to photography after studies in tropical geography, and published his first grand reportage in 1987 after spending four months underground in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.In 1990 he won a World Press Award for his photographs of the peoples of the Indus in Pakistan.For several years his work was coproduced with Sygma and then GLMR; he subsequently returned to freelancing, working regularly with the magazine press in France and elsewhere.
Since 1993 Cyril le Tourneur d'Ison has produced an annual series of portraits for a women's magazine, featuring women working for humanitarian causes. Two years' work on the railways of the world culminated in 2000 in a book published by Le Chêne and an exhibition at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan. Among the results of frequent trips to the Middle East are an Egyptian travel journal in collaboration with his wife, published by le Pré aux Clercs – Carnet de Voyage en Egypte – and a reportage on youth in the Gaza Strip.
In May 2006, an assignment on pollution in Ecuador featured in an exhibition on commitment in photography at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His travels have produced portraits of cities as diverse as Mexico City, Hanoi, Lahore and Damas, and world heritage subjects such as the peasant fortresses of Hakka in China and the kingdoms of the Nile in Sudan.
Le Tourneur d'Ison also regularly covers lifestyle subjects such as wine - with a book due for publication by Minerva La Martinière – and the world's finest hotels, which he has traveled the world to photograph for the lifestyle magazines. His eclectic choice of subjects is as much a personal trademark as is his passion for the fixed image – no easy option in a world in which photography is undergoing a technological and aesthetic revolution.
His approach to travel photography seeks to encompass the demands of reality and humanity, to produce "images of faraway places" that always attempt to avoid complacency, by striving to impose sincerity of focus and vision.