Frédéric David French, b. 1969

Frédéric David is a French photographer, born in 1969, who divides his time between Paris and Biarritz. For twenty-six years, David worked alongside Karl Lagerfeld, an experience that forged a rare understanding of the image, its power, and its limits. But where fashion demands the immediate, the seasonal, the now, David has chosen a different direction entirely. His practice is a deliberate turning away from that world, a search for something that resists time rather than serves it.

His photographs are not simply taken, they are made, and then unmade. Each print is dissolved through a delicate transfer process, veiled, partially erased, its surface fractured before being scanned and revealed on fine art paper. Then comes the final gesture: varnish, applied by hand, thick and deliberate. The photograph takes on the texture and patina of a Renaissance canvas. The portrait becomes at once a vestige and a palimpsest, freed from any moment, belonging to none in particular.

The result is work of quiet, enduring presence.