Since 2005, Jean-François Bouchard has developed a lens-based visual art practice engaging with individuals and communities situated beyond dominant social frameworks. Grounded in sustained attention to difference, the work approaches marginal and subcultural worlds as social systems that generate their own forms of meaning, identity, and belonging, and is informed by an interest in how alternate viewpoints and unfamiliar contexts reshape perception.
Positioned at the intersection of documentary practice and a conceptually driven, subjective inquiry, Bouchard’s work invites viewers into liminal environments shaped by proximity and encounter. Working across photography, film, sculpture, and installation, photography often serves as a point of departure that extends into spatial and material forms as a way of translating experience rather than representing it.
His work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals in several countries. His projects have been shown at Arsenal Contemporary Art in New York, Montreal, and Toronto. Artnet selected the In Guns We Trust exhibition as a “Must-see show in NYC,” and The Magenta Foundation published the monograph of this series of works. In early 2023, ArtForum selected his Exile from Babylon exhibition as an “Editor’s Pick”.
His photographs have been published in The Washington Post, Stern Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, and many others.
His recent project, The New Cubans, was launched at the Perrotin Store NYC and is published by PowerHouse Books, with a French co-edition by Éditions André Frère. The project has been exhibited at Blouin Division (Canada) and during Paris Photo at Fisheye Gallery, and was also presented in Cuba, Korea, and Mexico. The accompanying film, La Retaguardia, which he co-directed, was selected for the National Competition at the Festival du nouveau cinéma (2025).