Alain Fleischer

Alain Fleischer (b. 1944, Paris) is a French artist, filmmaker, novelist, and professor whose practice spans photography, video, installation, cinema, and writing. He studied linguistics, semiotics, and visual arts before developing a practice engaged with the properties of optical media — above all with the relationship between still and moving images, between light and its trace on photographic and cinematographic surfaces.

He is the founder and director of Le Fresnoy — Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, which he created in 1997 as an advanced research center for artists working in contemporary image technologies. Le Fresnoy has become one of the most significant institutions for advanced artistic education and production in France. His own extensive body of work encompasses several hundred films, installations, and photographs, as well as more than thirty novels, including essays on cinema and the image, and fiction published notably with Seuil and Gallimard. He received the Grand prix national de la photographie in 2000 and the Grand prix national du film documentaire. His installations have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, and major international institutions. A prolific writer, he contributes extensively to French literary and critical culture.