Edouard Elias
“All of the means that it takes to photograph a human being in a difficult situation (pain, loss, war, poverty, suffering) result from a deep desire and a work on personal adaptability.” > Read more
Originally from Gard, France, Edouard Elias lived in Egypt for ten years before returning to France in 2009 to study business. Soon after he branched off into photography and enrolled at the École de Condé in Nancy, where he developed a fascination for war photography. For his end-of-course internship in 2012, he travelled to Turkey and then Syria to shoot his first photo-reportage on Syrian refugee camps. Since then he has returned to Syria multiple times and was detained as a hostage by Islamic State jihadists over the course of ten months.
Upon his return, Elias began working on a long-term project focusing on The Foreign Legion in The Central African Republic and in France. Simultaneously he shot photo-stories on the use of rape as a weapon of war in The Democratic Republic of the Congo, on rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean as well as on the French Juvenile Justice System’s closed educational centers.
In 2015 Edouard Elias won the Prix de la ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik. He has been an associated photographer at Polka Galerie since February 2018.
