Biography

Franck Henry Godefroy is a Haitian born photographer. He describes his work as a balance between a setting, its composition and Its emptiness. He welcomes and appreciates ambiguity through the minimalism of his work. Photography was a hobby for the beginning years but he has progressively felt the want to explore and expand in a more purposeful way. He's honed his lens in his journey to master his craft and show others the same beauty he sees in the world around him.

Artist Statement

Franck Henry Godefroy’s photographic practice unfolds as a meditation on cultural memory, ancestral resilience, and the aesthetic sovereignty of the Black body. His lens becomes an instrument of reverence, translating histories of endurance and grace into a visual language of contemplation. Each image negotiates a delicate balance of light and shadow, presence and absence, silence and declaration. Through this equilibrium, Godefroy transforms photography into a mode of sentient reflection—one that honors both the spiritual and corporeal dimensions of Black existence. 

Godefroy’s portraits often inhabit a liminal space between sculpture and movement. His subjects appear suspended in time: statuesque yet alive, transcendent yet deeply grounded. Draped in garments of regal texture and volume, they evoke a visual lineage stretching across continents and epochs—from African royal portraiture to the European academic traditions that once sought to confine representations of Blackness within exoticized or subordinate frames. By reorienting these visual codes, Godefroy reclaims the authority of representation, rendering his subjects as embodiments of beauty, dignity, and historical continuity. 

His practice functions as an act of cultural preservation and reclamation. The images summon an awareness of the diasporic condition—not merely as displacement, but as a site of creativity, renewal, and transformation. In one series, figures stand within expansive landscapes and open fields, their poised stillness echoing the long histories of migration that have shaped the modern Black experience. The horizon becomes both metaphor and testimony: a symbol of endurance and the perpetual redefinition of belonging. Through this visual language, Godefroy connects intimate histories to global narratives, aligning the Great Migration in the United States with transatlantic and intercontinental movements across Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. 

The intellectual foundations of Godefroy’s work resonate with art historian Denise Murrell’s groundbreaking exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse. Murrell’s research exposes how Western art historically mediated Black presence through the lens of whiteness—reducing subjects to symbols rather than acknowledging them as individuals. Godefroy’s work directly responds to this imbalance. His camera repositions Black figures not as ancillary muses, but as autonomous protagonists within the visual narrative of modernity and beyond. By situating his subjects as central, self-possessed, and radiant, he declares that the gaze has shifted: the Black body no longer exists merely to be seen, but to see itself. 

At the core of Godefroy’s vision lies a contemporary introspection of identity. His subjects—often gazing outward in measured detachment—invite the viewer into a quiet confrontation with their own act of looking. The deliberate absence of biographical context strips away external narrative, allowing the encounter to unfold through form, texture, and emotion rather than sociological framing. In doing so, Godefroy asks us to witness Blackness as aesthetic truth, not as social condition. This insistence transforms his photography into both portrait and philosophy—an articulation of being that resists containment by history while remaining profoundly aware of it.

Through a practice that merges formal elegance with conceptual rigor, Franck Henry Godefroy restores visibility to the multiplicity of Black experience. His imagery becomes more than an archive of faces, gestures, and silences—it is a living testament to endurance, self-possession, and grace. In the radiance of his subjects, in the tension between motion and stillness, between light and shadow, Godefroy captures the essence of a collective inheritance: a visual poetics of survival, pride, and freedom that continues to shape the imagination of the present.

Exhibitions

  • Dear Black Women - Solo 2023 AWET Studios - New York - Artist

  • Boys Don’t Cry 2023 - Triangle Loft - New York - Artist

  • Since We’re Here 2022 - Heath Gallery - New York - Artist

  • NOULA 2021 Buick - Building - Miami Design District - Miami - Artist

  • Festival Diversity 2022 BASE MILANO - Milan - Artist

  • soiree henzo: RENAISSANCE of RECONNECTING 2023 - Lavan Chelsea - New York - Artist

  • White Linen Night 2024 - New Orleans - Curator Artist

  • IMAMOU 2024 - Art Conscious - New Orleans - Artist

  • Sur-Real Exhibition 2024 - Photo Alliance - New Orleans - Curator

  • Revolisyon Toupatou 2025 - The Kellen Gallery - Artist

  • Men Anpil Chay Pa Lou 2025 - Haiti Cultural Exchange - Curator / Artist

Social Media