LMS Gallery presents a completely innovative retrospective devoted to the work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, covering more than 45 years of photography. Revealing certain prints never before showed, the exhibition plunges into the memory of an artist who has never ceased to photograph the world in an endeavour better to understand it. About fifty prints will be on exhibition in Brussels from 12th October to 22nd December 2018.

As the very first Retrospective, LMS Gallery also make the solo show travelling worldwide starting in 2019 with Switzerland (Geneva), France (Megève), USA (New-York), early 2020 in France (Paris) and many more cities to come.

Unpublished for this retrospective, LMS Gallery exposes Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Polaroïds presented to the public for the first time. Annotated, they are a sketch, the first composition before shooting. The Polaroïd was used to make his light, allowing him to adjust his diaphragm and shutter speed. They are the ancestors of digital screens that display data instantly. Each Polaroïd is unique and presented for sale accompanied by its corresponding photograph.

This exhibition presents prints from his most famous works, among which certain photographs until now preserved in slide form for more than 30 years. Curious and passionate by nature, Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s disposition caused him to spend many years working on the same subject. He has always sort to get to the heart of his subjects and in so doing has given his work all its strength and humanity.  

 A retrospective of these forty years of work, unveiled for the first time at the LMS Gallery, recounts this journey, that of a man of commitment who works like a scientist in an attempt to explain the Earth and its phenomena in an artistic way, by seeking the sense, graphic form and emotion.

Born in Paris in 1946, Yann Arthus-Bertrand went to live in Kenya at the age of 30 so as to study the behaviour of a family of lions.  While there, he used photography as a research tool which enabled him to illustrate his subject.  It was to finance his project that he became a Montgolfier pilot and that he learnt aerial photography, the starting point of his work on the Earth from the air.

During the decade which followed his return from Kenya Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s focus was on photo-journalism and he covered numerous large sporting and other events.  Among these was the Paris-Dakar race which he followed and during which he distinguished himself from fellow photographers by preferring to photograph the participants and their environment rather than the race itself.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Yann Arthus-Bertrand began taking an interest in the different professions practiced in France and took a whole series of portraits.  At that time, he was looking for a way to give a new orientation to his work, by photographing more personal subjects, via the exploration among others of the link between man and animal.  From this was born the series « Les Bestiaux », photograhed between 1991 and 2005, and « Horses »between 1990 and 2006.

Motivated subsequently by the desire to raise public awareness of the beauties of the Earth, he envisaged a crazy project : make a photographic inventory of the planet for the year 2000 millenium change.  This came into being in 1994, under the title« The Earth from the Air »and was sponsored by UNESCO.  The outdoor exhibition of these large format photos, installed in particular on the railings surrounding the Luxembourg Garden in Paris in 2000, was seen in a hundred different countries by more than 200 million visitors.  Ever since, he who habitually says : « The lions taught me photography », continues tirelessly to offer to the public a unique way of looking at our environment.

In 2006, Yann Arthus-Bertrand was, with Lucien Clergue, one of the two photographers elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in France on the occasion of the creation of a new section devoted to photography.  In 2009, it was as a film director that he presented his first full-length feature, Home, a true evaluation of the state of the planet and the solutions to preserve it.   He went on to produce several other films among which Planète Océan in 2012, and Human in 2015.  The next one, Woman, in currently in production.