Virgile Simon Bertrand

Virgile Simon Bertrand is a French photographer who has been based in Asia since the late 1990s. Virgile studied Applied Arts at Ecole Boulle (1988 - 1991, Paris), Graphic Design at Ecole Duperre (Paris) and Photography at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie (1993, Arles). Virgile began his career assisting Magnum photographer Abbas and working as a photographer for the Opera National de Paris. Bertrand's interest in the relationship between the individual, space and scale permeates both his fine art photography and his commercial work and began with his first major projects for the Opera and for Donald Byrd/The Group in New York. After completing his National Service at the Service Photographique des Armƒees, Virgile moved to Asia, establishing a successful commercial practice. His work has been commissioned by architects such as Zaha Hadid Associates, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Cesar Pelli and RMJM and published in magazines such as Qvest, Interni, ID, Vogue, Forbes, Wallpaper, Intramuros and Mark. In 2004 Virgile was awarded the Foreign Correspondents' Club Hong Kong Photograph of the Year for his portrait of Cardinal Zen and was a finalist in the Best Commissioned Portrait Category for the 2009 AOP Awards. His work has been exhibited in Taipei, Hong Kong, Paris, Arles and in London in the 2008 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery. Virgile has also been selected as one of ten finalists in the Architectural Category of the 2009 Hasselblad Masters Competition. In 2009 a retrospective of Bertrand's work under the title Proxemics was held at Artistree, and was recognized as the best exhibition of 2009 by the South China Morning Post.

2010 - 2011 CREATIVITY AWARDS INTERNATIONAL (Editorial Design, Single Spread, GOLD AWARD) 
2010 SOPA AWARDS (Excellence in Feature Photography - WINNER)
2009 HASSELBLAD MASTERS AWARDS (ARCHITECTURE - FINALIST)
2009 ASSOCIATION OF PHOTOGRAPHERS AWARDS (UK) (LOCATION PORTRAITURE - FINALIST)
2008 TAYLOR WESSING PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery, London.

30LX
2P CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY 
G/F, 6-20 Po Tuck Street
Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
From 14 January 2011 until 27 February 2011

30 lx or ˜30 lux™ is the minimum light intensity required by the Buildings Department'™s Code of Practice for the Provision of Means of Escape. Constructed using low cost materials, devoid of any ornamentation, these compulsory means of escape are perhaps the purest examples of entropic architecture. Virgile Simon Bertrand'™s photographic studies draw attention to an inadvertent phenomenon, how despite the common genesis of these architectural features, each offers subtle but surprising structural variations that give rise to an elegantly minimal formal vocabulary.

Swire Pacific, Alain Mikli, Coach, Hermes, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Cathay Pacific Airways, Adidas, HSBC, Peninsula Hotels, Mandarin Oriental, Frame, Mark, Giorgio Armani, Vogue, Vogue Living Australia, Forbes, Das Magazin, Taschen, Qvest, Wallpaper.