About Valentin

Valentin Denyset is a documentary photographer and filmmaker, born in 1993 in the suburbs of Paris. He trained as an engineer and also studied modern literature.

He discovered photography as a teenager through his father’s film camera. For several years, his work focused mainly on landscapes, with a particular fascination for the Arctic’s vast expanses and the northern lights. In 2018 and 2019, he embarked on two solo journeys through the Scandinavian Far North, eventually spending a winter alone in a cabin in Finnmark, Norway. This experience shaped his reflections on solitude, self-awareness and relationships with others. It led to an unpublished book and the film Alone beneath the northern lights, which won awards at numerous international festivals and was entered for the 2023 César Awards in the documentary short film category.

Over time, his work turned towards people and their ways of life. In northern Mongolia, he shared the daily lives of Tsaatan reindeer herders. He continued his documentary work with Tuareg families around Djanet, pilgrims in Andalusia and mussel farmers in Brittany. Attentive to light and colour, he photographs the gestures of work, relationships and the ordinary moments through which individual lives take shape.

These encounters now form All that follows, a long-term documentary project about how we build our lives. He explores freedom of choice, the bonds we hold on to and the constraints we have to work within. The stories he photographs inform his own search: do we truly choose the lives we lead?

His photographs have appeared in publications including GEO France and Terre Sauvage, and have been exhibited at the Mongolian Embassy in France.