JEAN-ROBERT FRANCO

After studying management in France and California, Jean-Robert Franco became a relationship management consultant, but gradually developed a professional activity in the field of photography.

He studied philosophy at Ehess with Heinz Wismann.

It was in Los Angeles that he met artists, painters and graphic designers. It was these encounters that later led him to devote himself entirely to a career as a photographer, first in the field of fashion, then that of photojournalism, finally that of contemporary photography.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Jean-Robert Franco joined the Viva photographic agency, which in 1982 became the Viva-Compagnie des reporters agency. It was during this period that Max Gallo described Jean-Robert Franco's style:

We thought everything had been said about Nice. You just need to discover the photographs of Jean-Robert Franco to know that we can reinvent the city, the sea and the colors. Rarely has an artist worked with so much intelligence to confront the blue of the sky and the sea with the ocher, and separate them by the clear fracture of the lines: railing, barrier, facades, grilles, columns. Rarely has the precision of the border been so highlighted, opposing light and shadow. The body of the bathers appears in such a play of surfaces as a disembodied volume, an object captured in its materiality, a mass between masses. From these surface crossings, from these intersections emerges a personal vision: an austere and straight Nice. The one I dream of.

Max Gallo, 1982

At the end of the 1980s, Jean-Robert Franco gradually moved from a photojournalist activity to an exclusively artistic activity and organized his first exhibitions at the Center Pompidou in 1987.

In 1986, his artistic photography was nationally recognized with the photograph ''The Kiss,'' which was the subject of an acquisition by the National Art Fund, with an attribution in 1988 to the National Museum of Modern Art. Pompidou Center.

From the 2000s, Jean-Robert Franco acquired international recognition, which led him to exhibit in Milan, San Francisco, Busan and Gwangju.

In 2003, La Maison des metallos, newly converted into a Parisian cultural venue, exhibited for its inauguration a photographic work by Jean-Robert Franco:

In 2013, Jean-Robert Franco presented his exploratory and long-term work on the city of his childhood, Nice “Always about Nice”

In 2015, his work dedicated to the Promenade des Anglais seaside was reported.

More recently, the book Nice by Jean-Robert Franco is published in the “Portraits of cities” collection.