Yannick Cormier

Yannick Cormier was born in 1975 in France. In the early 2000s, he worked in the studio Astre in Paris parallel to his photographic studies in CIFAP. After years of working as an assistant for Patrick Swirc, William Klein, and others, he began a career as a documentary photographer. From 2003 to 2005 he teamed up with the agency Wostokpress and was sent to India as a correspondent. During those years, he fell in love with all that is India and decided to base himself in the coastal city of Chennai. In 2007 he founded the agency Trikaya Photos in India, to showcase emerging photographers working on sensitive issues. Since 2009, he has been working on the conflict in the region of Kashmir, the problem of drug addiction in Kolkata, and the marginalized transsexual community across India. His photography is an aesthetic testament of traditions that are endangered in modern India.

His images have been published in various international magazines such as the OjodePez, Courrier international, Libération, The Sunday Guardian, Le Nouvel Observateur, The Hindu, CNN, etc. His works reveal a form of resistance of to cultural identity by traditional societies or smaller communities who have not as yet been completely anesthetized by the modern consumerist world. It is an attempt to glimpse at the mythical attitudes of these groups. But more than myths, these images show people playing with symbols of a culture that is at ease with its traditions and hence can be self-mocking. His photography evokes the spiritual and the material, fiction and reality, tradition, and modernity. His photographs are living images that he discovers in travel, in social rituals, in religious ceremonies, in cultural fantasies, in personal dreams also more generally in all the games, sacred or ordinary, that distorts identity and appearance.

In spring 2018, Yannick moved to France, after 15 years spent in India. His works have been exhibited in India and abroad. His recent works titled Inauteriak was part of Images of Encounter, an online photography exhibition hosted by Ekalokam Trust for Photography during the Covid pandemic lockdown.

Published on January 27, 2021
See All Image of the Day | 365 days, 365 images