Agnès Dherbeys had always dreamed of being a journalist. Her secondary school diploma in hand, she entered the Lyon Political Science Institute and later received a post-graduate professional degree in communication sciences from CELSA. With these qualifications, her dreams seemed to be there for the taking, but a decisive meeting changed the course of her life: she would end up practicing journalism as a photographer. “It’s all for the best,” she says today, “because I actually feel a lot more comfortable with a camera in my hands. A photo gets to the heart of the matter more forcefully and directly and it does so with a wider range of emotions. I feel freer than I ever would with words or text.” She bought a camera, learned on the job and went to live in Asia 70% of the year, mainly in Bangkok, Thailand. In Asia, she began by covering various topics, many of them “chestnuts” for the Western press, and went on two major reporting assignments to Nepal. Several photos from that trip were eventually published in Japanese and Spanish magazines. She continued to crisscross Asia and travelled to Phuket the day after the tsunami, returning two months later to tirelessly document the country’s devastation.

Meanwhile, she registered with the photo agency Cosmos while continuing to self-produce most of her photo reports in Asia and the Middle East, including Palestine. She is currently drawn to East Timor, the world’s youngest country, a land she has seen few images of and is still getting to know. She hopes to make up for this lack of knowledge as quickly as possible and is planning to leave for East Timor in late November.

Achievements since winning the grant

Agnès Dherbeys has been working on the theme of independence in the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, commonly known as East Timor: what type of independence have the Timorese people won? Is it true independence, with a real impact on the daily lives of the country’s inhabitants? The recent ethnic confrontations in May and June 2006, which she covered, have proven that the country is far from being able to govern itself in political, economic and military terms. Agnès Dherbeys now lives most of the year in Bangkok, travelling around all of Southeast Asia, with trips from time to time to the Palestinian Territories and Nepal. Her work is distributed by the Cosmos agency and has been published in such publications as Le Monde2, Libération, Télérama, Marie-Claire, and Newsweek.
She is also a member of the EVE organization, an association of six women photographers created in 2006 on the theme of maternity.
In 2007, Agnès Dherbeys won the second prize in Story Spot news at World Press Photo 2007, for a report in Nepal in april 2006 .

Agnès Dherbeys will be at the 2007 Visa pour l'image festival in Perpignan (1st - 16 septembre) for her report : Timor Oriental : les rêves brisés de l'indépendance


AGE: 29 I PASSIONS: photography, cinema and music.  I  PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE:  give 100% of yourself every moment. I GOALS: to be a very good photographer, whose photos serve a good purpose I FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPHERS: Joseph Koudelka