Born in 1974.

Lives and works in Paris.


Stéphane Lagoutte has been a professional photographer for ten years. After graduating from art school he turned to documentary photography, bringing a sharply analytical eye to bear on society as, spontaneously or reflectively, he sought out people living their everyday and discreetly private lives. His pictures appear regularly in the press – National Geographique France, Animan, L’Express, Télérama, Le Monde 2, Courrier International, L’Equipe Magazine, Libération – and he received the Hachette Foundation Award in 2002. 

His work includes a 2002 study of the meeting of the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa in Mauritania, and a series on people living in makeshift housing, shown at the Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan in the same year. In 2003 he contributed to the "Ten New European Capitals" exhibition, firstly on the Champs-Elysées and then at the Transphotographiques festival in Lille. After several stays in Mauritania in 2003–05, he published Mauritanie – Lumière Noire (Trans Photographic Press). The images making up the book are currently part of an exhibition travelling through West Africa.  

He is a member of the MYOP agency since 2009.


Stéphane Lagoutte presented his work at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2006: Mauritania – Black Light at the Atelier des Forges. He also took part in the collective exhibitions Paths to Olympus in 2008 at the Stade Fournier and France 14 in 2010 at the abbaye de Montmajour.