Ed Alcock Prints the Truth

Ed Alcock is 52. A New York Times correspondent in Paris since 2000, he still works with Le Monde and The Economist, under the banner of the MYOP collective, which he joined in 2011. “We do all this to earn our bread,” he sums up, “but this is what we’re really here for”: with a sweep of the hand, he gestures at the images around him, born the day he finally decided, “I’m going to do what I actually want to do.”

For the first time, this personal body of work is being shown to the public in a single exhibition, where each series works like a developing bath, bringing the unspoken to the surface, the small lies and the great ones, familial and national alike.

The Click

In Greece, a few weeks after his wedding, the photographer devours Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian Novel. One of the author’s questions strikes him: “Why do we always pretend not to be there?” It resonates with an imposture he knows well, that of the documentary photographer as neutral, invisible witness, a fiction he can no longer believe in, now that he is photographing his own wife and son.

He then chooses to own his position, without evasion, as both father and implicated author: a shift that will give rise to Hobbledehoy (2009-2013), his first fully autobiographical project, its title borrowed from a song his own father used to sing to him: “He was neither a man nor a boy; he was just a hobbledehoy.” The series opens on a photograph of his son Nino asleep in his mother’s arms.

Shoreline, from the series Hobbledehoy, by Ed Alcock (2013). © Ed Alcock / MYOP 2025

Some time later, on an assignment, he dares to show it to an editor at Psychology Magazine, rather than his usual portfolio. A month goes by. The phone rings: “Would you be interested in photographing Emmanuel Carrère?” On the day of the shoot, the writer, watching him set up, retreats to his study, comes back visibly moved, and, on his way out the door, says simply: “If you ever make a book of this, I’d like to write something for it.” That text will become The Closed Room, which visitors can listen to in the exhibition, read aloud by the novelist himself.

Sunlit, Mediterranean scenes give way to greener images, where an abandoned garden and forgotten toys speak, in the exhibition’s own words, of “a gradual shift from one age to another.” The project, he confides, took four summers to complete, from 2009 to 2013. His next series, Love Lane (2014) and, above all, The Wait (2015), grow out of a far heavier confession…

The Weight of Silence

Then a student in London, Ed Alcock receives a call from his father. “I had an affair,” he tells him. “There’s a child. You have a half-brother.” His parents then ask him to keep the secret from his grandparents. He will keep his word. Every time his grandfather Harry asks after his parents, he answers as though nothing were wrong: a small, repeated lie that, year after year, drives them apart.

When Harry dies in 2013, Ed Alcock feels a guilty relief, aware that he will no longer have to play that part in front of him. It’s in the strangeness of that feeling that he finally measures the full weight of the family’s silence. Back in Sleaford for his grandfather’s funeral, he improvises a method that will never leave him: stopping any stranger in the street who makes him turn his head, and asking to take their portrait.

Just do it, from the series Love Lane, by Ed Alcock (2014). © Ed Alcock / MYOP 2025

Masked boy, from the series The Wait, by Ed Alcock (2015). © Ed Alcock / MYOP 2025

He develops the contact sheets but, judging them poor, files them away in a drawer. A year passes. When his agency insists he show them, looking again he realizes he has photographed only young men the age of his half-brother, and old men the age of his grandfather.

In 2015, a London gallerist wants to show the series. Convinced that his half-brother, still unaware, might stumble across an article, he strikes a deal with his father: he’ll call it off if his father finally tells his son the truth. His father promises, but will never keep his word. The Wait grows out of that broken promise: a masked boy, a house glowing in the fog, in a manner reminiscent of Todd Hido. To this day, his half-brother has no idea he exists.

Legends of Belonging

Elsewhere, another rupture is brewing, this time on the scale of an entire country. On the morning of 24 June 2016, waking to the referendum result, Ed Alcock cannot cool down: “I’m furious, genuinely furious. I was born European.” He pitches Le Monde‘s newsroom a road trip across the United Kingdom the day after the vote for Brexit, out of which will come the series Home Sweet Home (2016-2020), partly drawn from those very commissions for the paper, and, in the same breath, searches Google for “how to become French,” a query that will lead to a more intimate body of work built around his own naturalisation.

In Bradford, he photographs Tom: shaved head, furrowed brow, a still-fresh cut across his forehead. Convinced he has found an archetypal Brexiteer, the photographer is entirely wrong: it’s Tom who voted Remain, and his father who voted Leave. His other series, titled My Ancestors (and the) Gauls (2018), grew out of a campaign remark by François Fillon and Nicolas Sarkozy about the “Gallic ancestors” of “true Frenchmen.”

Still awaiting French nationality, Ed Alcock feels targeted. He traces the phrase back to the men who coined it, Renan and Lavisse, in 1882, and overlays their texts onto portraits of his own lineage, generation after generation, back to a great-great-grandmother born, he notes with relish, the very same year as those two historians. “All our family stories are a little bit fiction,” he will say. “Scratch the surface just a little, and it all comes apart.”

He becomes French in 2018, which does nothing to ease the sense of betraying his origins that he has always carried, a man who calls himself a “class defector.” His most recent series, Buried Treasure (2023-2025), grows out of a first trip to Horden, a mining village where generations of coal-blackened miners toiled underground, among them his great-uncle Kendon, dead at seventeen.

A tragedy that, according to family lore, pushed his grandfather to leave the region and become a tenant farmer in the south, in the very place where Ed Alcock himself might have grown up. He had never set foot there himself before he was well past forty, yet feels drawn to it, he says, “like a rusty nail to a magnet.”

It All Comes Apart

The village receives him coldly at first, taking him for some kind of deindustrialisation tourist, then takes him in once his family ties are known. At the pub, he tells the story exactly as he has always heard it told: Kendon buried when a crane toppled into the mine. An old man dismisses the legend with a single line: “There was no crane in the mines. You can’t get one underground.”

Self-portrait, 480 seconds from the series The Wait, by Ed Alcock (2015). © Ed Alcock / MYOP 2025

Intrigued, Ed Alcock launches his own investigation. Kendon, he discovers, did not die in some dramatic accident, but of tuberculosis, brought on by the coal and rock dust he breathed underground. “My first reaction, as an artist, was disappointment,” he will say. “I’d spent all this time building a project on a story that wasn’t true. Then I realized that made it even more interesting.”

For this series, he also buries old family photographs in the contaminated soil, then digs them up again: with the cemetery long since razed, it’s his way of knowing where his dead now lie. The pictures come back eaten away by rust. Exhausted after a stay in the village, he has his blood tested: it shows, he says, “a massive increase in iron, three times the normal amount,” possibly from drinking the local tap water.

The film accompanying the exhibition holds the rawest confession in the whole body of work, one now devoted to bringing the truth to light: that of a child ashamed of once having preferred the comfortable home of his paternal grandparents to the cold prefab house of his grandfather on his mother’s side. This is no longer a matter of lying, but of remorse, and perhaps, of amends. “This project,” his voice-over says, “is perhaps also a way to say sorry.”

Ed Alcock’s exhibition “Secrets and Lies”, presented by the Jeu de Paume, is on view at the Château de Tours (France) until 8 November 2026.