Sébastien de Oliveira

Sébastien de Oliveira is not a photographer! He's a colorist: he creates color photos from black and white ones. Most of the colors he chooses come from his own imagination. "What I offer is an artistic proposal," he says in an interview with the daily newspaper Ouest-France, "you could offer the same image to ten different colorists, and the ten results would be different." A graduate of the Beaux-Arts School, Sébastien de Oliveira first worked as an illustrator for an architect in Milan, before assisting the renowned fashion illustrator François Berthoud. In 2004, he moved to Paris as a freelance photo retoucher for fashion houses. He began colorizing photos as a simple hobby before turning it into a fully-fledged professional activity. In 2019, his first colorization book was based on photos of Dunkirk during the Occupation (Ici et maintenant, Ed. L'Erre de rien). The following year, it's Louis Vuitton (Voyages extraordinaires, Ed. Xavier Barral). In 2022, he published Back To America (Ed. du Chêne), in which he colorized 173 photos of America in the 40s.