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.

My research field is within an allegorical practice of photography, which consists in foregrounding the cultural, arbitrary and constructed nature of representations. Such an investigation understands the photograph as being informed by specific pictorial genres, embedded in a specific discourse. Genres under investigation include the still life, concerned with the depiction of objects in a studio setting; the bestiary, as the construction of a metaphysical zoo; photographs of buildings and the modernist discourse of architecture

Apart from photographic practice as such, an intrinsic aspect of the research field is a theoretical investigation of the image, and of photographs as a particular class of images.

Thus the practice of making images and the practice of writing about the image define the field of my research: photographic practice as an investigation of genres as much as theory and criticism of photography constitute my field of enquiry.

Jo Longhurst