Bio
Gaël Turine (b. 1972) is based in Paris and Brussels. He spent a very formative year, at the age of 8, in the Comoros Islands (Indian Ocean). His father, a novelist and documentary radio producer, was teaching French and his mother was writing about documentary film projects. Though his brother and himself missed school, living with local people left Gaël with an abiding curiosity about the nature of societies beyond his own.
After secondary studies back in Belgium, Gaël left for 6 months to Madagascar, where he had his first photographic experience. When he returned home he was inspired to take photography studies. During those three years, Gaël got assignments (Angola, Afghanistan and Eritrea) for NGO’s in order to have social and humanitarian stories to show to his teachers.
Just after he got his degree in photography in 1997, Gaël began the personal project "Aveuglément" (Blindly) photographing the cooperatives for the blind in West Africa, which later became a book "AVEUGLEMENT" in the Photo Poche series edited by Robert Delpire 2001. The serie has been exhibited in 5 European capitals and awarded twice. In the same year, after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, he got several assignments to make the "Being 20 in Kabul" book project, published in 2003 ("Avoir 20 ans à Kaboul", Alternatives editions, Paris). The exhibition travelled in different European places.
In 1998 Gaël received a grant from a private Belgian foundation to work in Eritrea, travelling to that East African nation four times to work within two years. In 2004, he received the first grant given by the Aftermath Grant Project (USA), which afforded him three more trips to Eritrea and the completion of his project. The body of work has been shown as an exhibition in 2007 Visa Pour l’Image edition.
In 2006, Gaël was the recipient of the Golden Clover award, Belgium, to complete his project on the route of the Voodoo cult, from its African origins to Haiti and the United States. The whole project is coming out late 2010 with a book and an exhibition.
In 2009, the three years project "Aujourd’hui c’est demain" ("Today is tomorrow"), photographing 25 people cured from cancers, has been published in a book by Delpire Editeur and shown in galleries in Brussels and Paris. In 2012, Gael Turine was the recipient of St Brieuc Photoreporter Festival Grant and the Fund for Journalism Grant in 2014 to complete "The wall and the fear" project on the Indian border wall along its border with Bangladesh. The exhibition was presented during festivals, in museums, galleries and has been widely published in press. In 2013, he started to teach photography to young Haitian photographers at Fokal Foundation in Port au Prince. Gael Turine also produced a personal work on the Haitian capital and the book "En bas la ville" came out in June 2017.
Among others, assignments or personal stories have been published in the US, European and a few Asian magazines like Geo, Figaro magazine, Paris Match, L'Espresso, Libération, Stern, l’Express, New York Times, Le Monde, De Morgen, Marie Claire, Time, Der Spiegel, Gazeta Magazine, Grands Reportages, De Volkskrant Sunday Magazine, Knack magazine, Grande travel magazine, De Standaard, XXI magazine, Suomen Kuvalehti magazine, 6 mois, La Republica magazine, Io Donna, DU magazin, XXI, Adbusters, featured in Leica World magazine, Photo, Photographers International,…
Gaël was involved into group photographic projects with international photographers for collective books and exhibitions.
Gael Turine teaches workshops in various countries and is the Photojournalism and Documentary photography teacher at the ULB, the main public University in Brussels.