Bio
French photographer, member of Agence VU in Paris. Of Vietnamese origin, born in Laos, he fled with his family one night across the Mekong River; they later found asylum in France. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Lyon, he worked as a humanitarian aid worker before turning to photography.
As a photojournalist, Lâm Duc Hiên has documented the major conflicts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from Iraq and Bosnia to Chechnya and Rwanda. His work has been widely published and exhibited internationally, appearing in Le Monde, GEO, The New York Times and the Czech press. His sensitive approach to documentary photography has earned him numerous awards, including first prize at World Press Photo for his series Iraqi People, the Leica Award, and grants from the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and the Fondation pour la Vocation.
Since 1991 he has been documenting the lives of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in particular the cultural and religious diversity of a region where Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Kakais, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians and Jews have lived side by side for centuries.
The images on display form part of a thirty-year photographic chronicle, published in the book Kurdistan Mon Ami, available in French/Kurdish, English/Arabic and Czech editions.
Awards
1994
Prize of the Foundation Marcel Bluestein-Blanchet, France
1994
Prize of the National Center of Photography, Less Thirty, France
1995
European Prize of the city of Vevey, Switzerland
1996
Villa Medicis Hors les Murs Scholarship
2001
World Press Photo Contest, first prize category “Portrait Stories”, Netherlands
2004
Prize of the Festival “Chroniques Nomades”, France
“Hiên Lâm Duc’s photography is a photography of necessity. The need to recover one’s history, one’s childhood, one’s identity, the need, because of one’s own history, to bear witness so that others do not suffer a similar one, the need to tell.”
– Christian Caujolle