François Besch

Biography

In December 2013 the Luxembourg post office issued five stamps showing wild mushrooms. François Besch made the pictures for them with the Hipstamatic app on a smartphone.

He was born on 11 April 1963 in Esch-sur-Alzette. He taught himself photography. He began shooting in the 1980s: portraits, street scenes, experiments with the image. By other accounts he has been exhibiting since 1977, that is, since the age of fourteen, and this is hard to verify. Landscapes and nature came later, and in them he is interested above all in the feeling and mood of the picture rather than in an accurate description of the place. He works with classic cameras as well as a smartphone.

Since 2006 Besch has lived and worked in Bivange, the village where the American photographer of Luxembourgish descent Edward Steichen was born.

In 2011 his exhibition “Down here | Up there” opened at the Galerie Terres Rouges in Esch-sur-Alzette. All the works in it were made with Hipstamatic on an iPhone; according to descriptions, it was the first such exhibition in Luxembourg. In 2012 “Poetic Renaissance” was held at the Galerie Clairefontaine in Luxembourg, and in 2013 his exhibition “Von Glückspilzen und anderen Lichtwelten” (“Of Lucky Fellows and Other Worlds of Light”) was shown there too. The collector, curator and gallery owner Marita Ruiter included his pictures in a show in 2012 alongside works by Man Ray, Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann (known as Horst P. Horst) and Anselm Kiefer, and in 2013, as part of the European Month of Photography, gave him a solo exhibition. That same year, commissioned by the Luxembourg branch of the Berlitz language schools, he made the open-air exhibition “Multilingual Teens” on Place Guillaume II in Luxembourg; by other accounts it took place in 2014. In 2012 the Mudam museum also showed his work in the project “Money (The Mobile Museum)”. Among his shows abroad in 2013 were “The Story of the Creative” at See.Me Exhibition Space in New York and “Let it Shine” at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art in New York.

The 2013 stamp series consisted of five of his portraits of wild mushrooms, which the post office acquired that same year. According to reports, it was the first series of postage stamps in the world made with this app.

In 2014 Besch received the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, at the rank of knight. He also makes portraits of well-known people on a smartphone: his sitters include the photographers John Morris, Lucien Clergue and David Hamilton. It seems to me that this series made him known outside the country.

In 2014 his work was shown at the autumn salon of the Cercle Artistique de Luxembourg; in 2015 it appeared in the project “BeNeLux” at the Galerie bij de Boeken in Ulft, in the Netherlands, and in the programme “Six Lives in Photography” at Photomeetings Luxembourg. In 2016 he took part in Luxembourg Art Week and again in the circle’s autumn salon. In March 2017 he was awarded the eighth Monika von Boch Prize for photography, for his artistic work on the iPhone. That year his solo exhibition “François Besch, Hipstamatics” was held at Museum Schloss Fellenberg in Merzig, Germany.