Samuel Bollendorff first discovered photography when his father bought an enlarger when the boy was 11 years old. It was not long before he left the darkroom that had been set up in his mother's cellar to land an arts-focused baccalauréat and embark on studies that reflected his passion: an advanced vocational diploma in photography and a two-year university diploma in art history, not to mention the two years he spent at the School of Fine Arts in Paris.
From China (traditional medicine) to Macedonia (family breakdown) via Albania, India, Tunisia and St. Petersburg, the quality of his photojournalism shone out from the pages of magazines such as Elle, which was regularly seduced by a way of working that people claimed was "different". You need look no further than the two major collections he produced during 1998 and 2001 for proof: Les Univers Scolaires, a study of academic environments, and Hôpital Silence: "In hospitals, people are equal in facing their own illnesses. There is no artifice. I refuse to reduce patients to their illnesses. I also want to show the lives they lead, what they have within them, their dignity."

Achievements since winning the grant
Samuel is a member of the L'oeil Public collective, and works regularly for Elle magazine and the newspaper Libération. In 2002, the photojournalism that won him the Foundation prize was published in Elle and Libération and exhibited in Perpignan. He also produced a documentary piece, Ils Venaient d’Avoir 80 Ans, about people who had just passed their 80th birthdays. The exhibition Silence, supported by Paris City Hall and the French Ministry of Health, summed up five years of work and brought together Hôpital Silence, Inégalités SIDA and Ils Venaient d’Avoir 80 Ans. In 2004, he took part in Regards sur 10 Nouvelles Capitales Européennes on the Champs-Elysées. Samuel is also one of the authors of Viv^re le Sport, a beautiful book produced at the instigation of the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and published jointly with Editions du Chêne in September 2006.. For each book sold, two euros will be given to the non-profit organization Foot Citoyen for the promotion of citizenship values in football.