Stéphane Tourné was born in Hussein Dey, in Algeria. Love, Simplicity, Humility and Honesty were the primary values in his family.  In 1984, he graduates from the Institute of Civil Engineering in Grenoble, France. He then moves to Paris where he starts a career as a model, that will trigger his love of travel that has become obsessional.  This passion for travel will take him to India, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Thailand, Bali, South Africa, and many more destinations.

Stéphane’s interest for photography starts growing and he starts learning during all his photoshoots. He knows he will end up to the other side of the camera. He decides to fully dedicate himself to photography in the 1990s.  During the 90s and 2000s, Stéphane works for Magazines, Advertisement Agencies, and shoots artistic shots of models.

In 1999, he falls in love with Africa and decides to settle in Dakar, Senegal.

Among the celebrities he photographs in black and white: Youssou Ndour, Tiken Jah Fakoli, Jacob Desvarieux, Frank Leboeuf, Kymani Marley, Rockmond Dunbar, Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke.  In 2006, he is commissioned by the President of Senegal to deliver a series of photograph on Senegalese arts and crafts for an exhibit at UNESCO (Paris, May 2006).

He collaborates with international magazines and NGOs. He exports his images all over the world.

FAIR TRADE (September/October 2011)

Between 2005 and 2008, Stéphane has exhibits in Senegal in Dakar and in France in Marseille, Saint Jean de Luz and Paris for an exhibit called “ Ici l’Espoir”.  This body of work was the impetus of The Loft at Liz’s “Fair Trade” exhibit.

Tourné invites us to discover his vision of a current issue, treated in a simple and efficient manner: the Photographer presents nude bodies, sculpted and re-thought with consumption products.  This fusion between esthetic chic and real issues give a trashy sensual feel that exposes fair trade in Africa.  He also exposes pollution due to plastic in a series of photographs where he crucifies, then frees up his models with plastic.

All his shots are directed in exterior light, but as if in a studio.

His light source is the sun. He created a deep black background especially for this series so that the focus stay on the subject.  Indeed, Stéphane is not a man you can lock up: as he often says “ My studio is the biggest studio in the world: it is the world!”

In September 2008, he decides to settle in Los Angeles. There, he photographs artists like Brianna Haynes, Mao Otayek, El Compra Sacra for their album covers. Following Sergio Ponzo’s suggestion, Brianna’s producer and composer, he also directs music videos, like “Let it Slide”.  On September 25 2010, Stéphane received the Trophy for Best Fashion Photographer at the Afrika Fashion Awards.  Stéphane is the official photographer for the FESMAN (World Festival of Art Nègres). His photos of African artists at this occasion are published in the book “Made in Dakar”, by Fabrice Hervieu Wane.

ABOUT FACE: A New Perspective on Photographic Portraiture (March/April 2011)

“Here they are ! Six portraits of children gazing at me with their big eyes, certain very grave, others smiling. (2 images featured)

It’s rather me looking at them, in fact. Their colors, their centering, their grains of sand, their pebbles, like a caress I barely dare to touch them , so much so I fear to frighten away this gravity, this exquisite fragility, so delicate…

This evening, it is with a painful patience that I plunge my gaze into these children’s faces, coming from Africa, but from another divide : that of the waiting, of unkept promises, of speeches falling apart around  these young lives, of stones sucked when returning from the beach, still carrying crystalline traces on one’s shoulders, of these games that should  open up on the doors of schools but too often shut down on vagrancies  in the streets of cities, at the mercy of all kinds of exactions.

Is it because  they are veiled, as camouflaged, by the colored and scriptural traces of
Yolaine White’s paintings?

Is it because they are as fractured by the brush strokes that lacerate them with their pallid traces, their rear-writings of which no alphabet  can afford any precise transcription?

Is it because they are bathed in the opacity of the monochromes that hide their secrets, enclose them in the silences of the incommunicable?

Adorned, they are, in the halos of an evanescent light which robs them of any precise or perfect reading.

Dissolved in the infinite of a painter’s worlds, they come to us only unthreaded, undone, fractured, aureolating themselves of their own children’s powers that we’d wish never to be stolen from them.
Stephane Tourné has wanted this meeting with Yolaine White, which manifests as a fusion, an immersion of the pigments into the photographic grain, a penetration of the universe of the one, Yolaine, contemplative, meditative, into the image of the other, Stephane, who opts for silence.

On the canvas’s sibylline manuscripts , which inscribe themselves over the skins darkened by questionings, one would like to read : “Tomorrow, school, tomorrow, books, tomorrow libraries for all, everywhere, in the villages, the bush, on the beaches, in the neighborhoods, at the turn of every street, so that the smiles shall not crash onto walls of lamentations, so that these faces may light up at last on a smily future!”

For Stéphane Tourné and Yolaine White.
Sylvette Maurin.
Visual Arts Critique.
Octobre 2008, Nice, France.