François Hers (born in 1943 in Uccle, Brussels) is a Belgian photographer and artist. He has been living and working in France since 1968.
Biography
The itinerary and works of this artist from the conceptual movement follow in the image of the education he received. His mother (Nelly Stutz-Anagnostopoulos 1921–1987) taught him, through stories about the doings of his family during the Greek War of Independence and the Second Hellenic Republic, that it is possible to influence history. His father (Joseph Hers, 1884–1965), who spent over thirty-three years in China before founding a family, inspired him to search for the genuine motors of history behind those commonly accepted. Their house, by the architect Henry van de Velde, in which he lived until age 21, was a privileged meeting place for personalities who came to inform his father on political, religious, diplomatic, economic issues in Asia, the Soviet Union and Africa, in the framework of his activities to promote and favour exchanges with these regions of the globe, founded on first-hand information.
As for his artistic education, François Hers read books and reviews, manifests and other founding texts on European art history from 1900 to 1940: exhaustive publications left by Henry van de Velde in their house built in 1927, the "Nouvelle Maison," and that has since become a historic monument.
After a brief passage in architecture, questioning himself about what he could bring to the history of modern art he admired so much, François Hers understood that it was not with a traditional career and means that he could concretize a lifelong ambition that would guide his entire body of work.
In 1963, according to his own words, François Hers decided to break out of the museum walls that blocked the prospects Dada had opened up and create a pattern of connections between society, its artists and their works that would be as contemporary as the works themselves. In his opinion, whatever the formal progress suggested by the avant-garde, such connections still build up without a conscious choice and remain within frames thought of during the Renaissance.
In the sixties and the seventies, François Hers used photography as a means to achieve Performances and to question possible patterns of the relationships artists may develop with society, as well as the ones between society members themselves and the forms of each person's most intimate expressions.
In 1972, in Paris, he took part in creating an author-photographer's cooperative named Viva. He was the instigator of a collective reportage called Families in France, qualified as historic thanks to the incisive portrait it presents of the upheavals in French society.
To nourish his work with an experience of the world, the status of the reporter he had acquired enabled him to travel and to plunge into situations that would not have been open to him as an artist. It also offered him the opportunity of experimenting an economy based on demand, and as such, in opposition with anonymous exchange models which in the field of the arts are typically the ones of an economy based on offer. If, he thought, this mode of anonymous exchange was indeed historically necessary, since the autonomy and the freedom of artists had now been acquired, like everyone else's, they may no longer remain alone in responding to the creative needs of their society in a political economy of art that, furthermore, no longer responded to the demands of a democracy.
He held exhibitions in various museums and art centres. In 1980, at the Paris Biennale, he presented a series that revolutionized the art of the nude. He published, in 1982, in the daily newspaper Libération, a picture a day for five weeks, in association with a commentary, a reflection on the photographic act based on his relationship with the city he lives in: Paris. In 1981, he exhibited Intérieurs at the Centre Pompidou, along with a book published by the Brussels Modern Architecture Archives Editions, which stroke a responsive chord beyond the art world in Human sciences.