Olivier Richon was born in Lausanne in 1956. He studied at the Polytechnic of Central London, where he was taught by Victor Burgin, and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Film and Photographic Arts in 1980 and a Masters of Philosophy in 1988. In 1991, he received the Camera Austria award for contemporary photography. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1980 and is in many public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the National Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. He is currently head of the Department of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London.

He has also published several books, including Real Allegories, published by Steidl and commissioned by Ute Eskildsen, curator and director of the photographic collection of the Folkwang Museum in Essen. It comprises a twenty year retrospective of Richon's work. The title Real Allegories is taken from the notorious painting by Gustave Courbet, which shows a painter in the act of depiction, surrounded by his cultural contemporaries. In the context of Richon's work, Real Allegories refers to the realism or illusionism of the photograph and to the allegorical, constructed dimension of meaning and representation.

Jo Longhurst