Jean-Marc Balsière (b. 1980, Occitanie ) is a French documentary photographer based on the Mediterranean coast, near the Thau lagoon. His work is rooted in straight photography. Without staging or intervention, he photographs territories and the ordinary forms of everyday life: landscapes, inhabited places, and the simple situations in which fragments of the human condition quietly reveal themselves.

Working primarily in black and white, he builds long-term series founded

on presence, patience, and repeated returns to a place and to those who live there. Since 2011, his work has taken him from the shores of the Thau lagoon to Sicily, Sardinia, and Istanbul, where his series District 68 (2015) followed the ragpickers of a single Anatolian village living and working in the heart of the city. His ongoing work around the Mediterranean continues this attention to territory and to the lives bound to it.

In 2024, he founded Balsière Éditions, an independent publishing house

dedicated to documentary photography, devoted to supporting and distributing work attentive to reality and to the social, political, and cultural transformations of the present. His first monograph, Tout Thau Tour, was published by Balsière Éditions in 2024.

His prints are issued in strictly limited, signed and numbered editions.

I practice photography as a tool for observation, a means of approaching the world and preserving traces of it. My work is rooted in straight photography: no staging, no intervention. I photograph situations as they appear, in their simplicity and truth. I am drawn to places, ordinary gestures, and quiet moments that make up daily life. Each image is an attempt to capture an instant of reality, a fragment of the world as it presents itself. Photography becomes, in this way, a form of presence and attention: to look, to wait, and to recognize the moment when something reveals itself.