Born in 1969 in Strasbourg.
Lives and works between Paris, Hong Kong and Kinshasa.
A self-taught photographer, Patrick Willocq had a midlife rebirth. It was a return trip to Congo (where he grew up) in 2009 that made him quit the professional activities he had been carrying out for twenty years in Asia, in order to devote himself fully to photography, a thirty-year commitment.
Patrick draws on his imagination the art of metamorphosing reality with poignant scenes in the image of his deep humanist convictions. With the subject entirely part of his creative process, he practices an aesthetic never devoid of ethics. In all his carefully composed performative stagings, entirely constructed in situ rather than created on Photoshop, he sends messages that pass through a participatory theatricality. His artistic practice is a hybrid between ethnology, sociology, performance, installation, video and photography.Since 2012, he has been nominated for or chosen as a finalist or winner of multiple prestigious international awards, including SFR Jeunes Talents de Paris Photo 2012, Prix Photo de l’Agence Française de Développement 2012, Prix Découverte des Rencontres d’Arles 2014, Prix Coup de Coeur HSBC pour la Photographie 2016, Sony World Photography Awards 2016, Prix Niepce 2017, Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2014 and 2017.
Patrick is co-author, with director Florent de La Tullaye, of a 52-minute documentary film, Le Chant des Walés, broadcast on the television channel France 5 with a preview at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris at the end of 2016.
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