PARIS.- For four years the Jeu de Paume has been exhibiting the work of the previous year’s winner of the Niépce Gens d’Images Prize at the Château de Tours. Created in 1955, this annual prize is awarded to a professional photographer under the age of fifty who is either French or has been living in France for over three years.

In May 2025 the prize was awarded to Ed Alcock, whose candidacy was sponsored by Dominique Gaessler. Born in Norwich (United Kingdom) in 1974, Alcock has been living in France since 2000 and is a member of the Myop agency. For over fifteen years, he has been pursuing personal projects in parallel with press assignments, notably for The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and El País.

“Secrets and Lies” spans fifteen years of photographic work devoted to the family, transmission and the sense of belonging. The title refers to family secrets and convenient stratagems that are sometimes exposed and discredited, a theme that has been present in his work from the outset.

Alcock describes his photographic practice as an “intimate and narrative exploration of the real”. His method lies at the intersection of the autobiographical, documentary and fictional genres. It embodies the personal approach of autobiography, for in its own way each of the series is deeply rooted in the author’s own history, exploring his relationships with close family members, the question of paternity, one’s relation to one’s native country and social change over several generations.

From the documentary it takes a direct and often posed and frontal approach, which sometimes involves an underlying investigative intent and combines various types of images, usually taken by him but sometimes simply found. Finally, from fiction it borrows a predilection for the unspoken, constructing images that suggest more than they show, and in certain cases using drawing or film to complete and extend the ensemble.





The exhibition is structured around five series created between 2009 and 2025.

Hobbledehoy (2009-2013) is centred on his son Nino and explores the end of childhood and the transition to adolescence; Love Lane (2014) and The Wait (2015) are both variations on the family secret; Home, Sweet Home (2016–20) is an examination of people’s attachment to their native country during Brexit and the nature of national identity; and Buried Treasure (2025) revisits a fundamental family legend and its grey zones, contrasting the power of this myth with the prosaic, everyday reality of the places concerned. The exhibition’s overall layout is chronological. As if zooming out, it proceeds from the oldest, most intimate works to more recent ones that adopt a resolutely documentary approach.

Born in 1974 in Norwich, United Kingdom, Ed Alcock is an Anglo-French photographer and the recipient of the Prix Niépce – Gens d’Images 2025. He lives and works in Paris.

In 1999, he was awarded Best Young Photographer of the Year by The Guardian and The Independent. The following year, he moved to Paris to become a correspondent for The New York Times, and he has since collaborated with French and international publications—an engagement that also informs his personal projects.

In 2022, he was one of the recipients of the major photojournalism commission from the French Ministry of Culture for a project on nuclear risk, “Zones à risque”, which was exhibited in 2024 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France as part of the exhibition “La France sous leurs yeux”, and later at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce and the Hôtel Fontfreyde – Centre Photographique.

In 2022, 2023, and 2025, his portraits were selected for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

His other projects explore themes of family, transmission, and identity, including his dual cultural heritage. As an observant photographer working at a distance, his frontal portraits, made in color medium format, carry a strong social dimension and place him in the British documentary tradition (David Hurn, Nick Waplington, Anthony Haughey, Vanessa Winship…). At the same time, this engaged approach, which resonates with the sensibilities of Ken Loach, is paired with a more intimate inquiry. As Dominique Gaessler, editor and founder of Trans Photographic Press who sponsored Alcock’s Prix Niépce nomination, wrote: “At the boundaries of the unconscious, his work develops in the oscillation between an external reality and a search for his own origins.”

His work is also nourished by literature: the books of Emmanuel Carrère, in their way of weaving personal narratives from reality, and those of Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis, whose political writing of the self illuminates questions of class, identity, and memory, strongly resonate with his approach.

Alcock’s photographs have been shown in numerous institutions in France (Rencontres d’Arles, Circulation[s], Galerie du Château d’Eau) and internationally (GoEun Museum of Photography, South Korea; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz).

The work of Ed Alcock is represented by the MYOP agency.