PERTH.- In a world-first, legendary photographer Henry Roy holds his first survey at The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA).

Henry Roy – Impossible Island draws on 40-years of recollections and observations as it brings together 113 photos taken from 1983 to 2023. The images were shot in places such as his native Haiti, Ibiza, Paris, Dakar, Cameroon, Normandy, Marrakesh, Thailand, and the Ivory Coast.

“It feels serendipitous that we welcome Henry Roy to our island, Australia, and that these decades of work salute the imaginal realm of island life of different kinds through his enigmatic visual poetry,” said AGWA Director Colin Walker.

Impossible Island channels the many influences that have shaped Roy’s artistic journey including his exile from his homeland of Haiti to his love of literature and passion for New Wave French cinema.

About the project photographer Roy said, “Impossible Island evokes my exile from Haiti, and the quest for a metaphorical island, an imaginary refuge where one can escape the brutality of the world. It presents a bittersweet universe where water and sunlight dominate, symbols of both life and death.

“Here, one confronts a world marked by tension, a wavering between dream and reality, tragedy and sweetness, melancholy and voluptuousness. It reveals the unconscious of a Franco-Haitian artist who does not deny any aspect of his being. It is, above all, visual poetry, a work that appears simple and natural but is not bound by conventional codes. It comprises free, untamed images and texts, animistic prayers.”

Henry Roy’s work has been of international interest since the 1990s because of the incredible beauty and richness of his imagery, qualities that have made him a sought-after photographer in magazine editorial and exhibition contexts.

His photographic vision was a key component of the new publishing trends in the late 1990s, specifically as a contributor to Purple, and later in the 2000s Hobo magazine.

AGWA curator Robert Cook explains, “These were less commercially oriented fashion and lifestyle magazines that had a new thoughtfully philosophical bent to them. Shoots of clothing for instance were artfully embedded in everyday contexts and less sleekly theatrical their predecessors.

“These magazines often felt like open questions about the status of clothing, people, creativity and the like. This ran alongside of the rise of fashion designers like Martin Margiela, among others, that had a deconstructive air to them,” he said.

Roy was born into the unstable political situation of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. While still a young child, he and his family were forced to leave as political refugees, and they resettled in the south of France. He studied photography in Paris, and then worked as photojournalist and for advertising. In 1998 his work was discovered by Elein Fleiss, one of the editors of the French-based Purple magazine, and he published with them for ten years. In 1996, he published Regards Noirs, a book of portraits – inspired by photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn – dedicated to leading black French figures.

He charts what it is to live between cultures and geographies, between France and Haiti, and to map this disjuncture over all he sees. This includes being part of an interracial family, a theme that runs through the entire show and his practice.

Robert Cook adds, “One thing that is important about Roy’s work is that he doesn’t comment upon political issues front on but instead floats them within another world reimagined from the one we inhabit”.

Impossible Island runs until May 2025.

Henry Roy was born in 1963 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and moved to Paris with his family at the age of three where he has remained. He studied photography in Paris and has been active since the early 1980s.

Roy’s work has been published in major international journals such as Vogue Paris, Purple Journal, Purple Fashion, Air France Magazine, AD, W Magazine, Harper's Bazaar UK, Artreview, M Le Monde, L'Officiel Voyage, Apartamento, Hobo, and IntranQu'îllités.

He has produced six artist books since 1996: Regards Noir, Out of the Blue, Spirit, Mirage, Superstition and Ibiza Memories.