France. Photography.

Garnell was born in France in 1954. He began studying photography during his adolescence and later he studied computer engineering in Toulouse, where he investigated speech synthesis by computer.

At the end of 1983, he bought a large-format camera, and he took a set of urban landscapes in and around Toulouse. In 1984, he won the Kodak Critics Award, met Jean-François Chevrier and the photographers of the DATAR Photographic Mission, joining in 1985-1986. His professional career began to gain visibility from these geographical missions requested by the French government to document the landscape of the country.

His first personal and group exhibitions include series of images on Disorders, Portraits and Nights. He resided at the Cité des Arts de Paris in 1989-1990 and participated in exhibitions such as Other Objetivity at ICA London, CNAP Paris, MAC Prato; Photokunst in Stuttgart, Passages de l'image at the Center Pompidou, and at MOCA San Francisco. In 1990-1991 he also resided at the Akadémie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and he taught at the Marseille art school the following year.

In 1993 he worked for the Toulouse metro, on the windows of the Jolimont station. After the birth of his first son Emil, he moved to Châtenay-Malabry in 1994. In 1995 his solo exhibition took place at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur. In 1996 his second son Adam was born and he joined the Peyroulet gallery in Paris, where the first digital images of Les jours, Modules and Images were exhibited.

In 2000 he was appointed professor at the Art School of Tours and a year later he exhibited at the Kunstverein in Stuttgart and he collaborated with Belgian fashion designer Ann Huybens on various fabric patterns.

In 2003 he developed a first book project with 64 photographs, followed by another in 2004, with a set of 15 images, exhibited and edited by the Lectoure Photographic Center at the beginning of 2005.

He participated in the exhibition Objects in the lens at the National Library with 2 series, The survivors and The end of the table, as well as in the exhibition The force of art in 2006 at the Grand-Palais. It is also worth mentioning the participation in the exhibitions, Topographies of memory in Bilbao, in the Universal Archive of Tenerife and in the MACBA of Barcelona.

With his exhibition What is photography, the Center Pompidou's photography gallery was inaugurated in 2015, and in 2017 he participated in the study of the DATAR Photographic Mission. A year later he participated in Brighton Photo Biennial 2018: A New Europe.

Garnell invents a new genre around contemporary still life: the image of disorder. This is related to the "still life" as a construction site or a demolition site, in contrast to the popular scenes of the 18th century in painting, where the disorder of the rooms never aroused any particular interest among painters. These were limited to the representation of symbolic compositions as an expression of abundance, of vanity, so they completely surrendered to the charm of overload.

Surprisingly, the realism of the 19th century did not favor the resumption and continuation of the theme. Only perhaps an artist's studio (painter or sculptor) could be represented as a messy place, due to the romantic notion of genius as someone eccentric: his studio was an extraordinary place. The clutter of a construction site could be linked to the aesthetics of the romantic ruins. Garnell deals with the usual clutter and creates a new genre by playing with all the little nuances of the stage. Paradoxically, nothing is left here to the slightest chance, after all, Garnell is no longer concerned with the arrangement of objects, but with the composition as such, with space and therefore, with the pictorial form.