Martine Fougeron is a French-American artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Born in Paris, she lived and worked in New York for over two decades before returning to Paris. Prior to her artistic career, she led the creative division of International Flavors and Fragrances in New York, directing a team of twenty world-class perfumers — an experience that sharpened her synesthetic instinct for translating the invisible and wordless into image and story.
Educated at Sciences Po, Wellesley College, and the International Center of Photography in New York, Fougeron develops a long-term visual practice rooted in a 20-year inquiry into identity formation and transmission within the mother-son relationship — and now expanding, through her own family archive as a daughter and granddaughter and moving image, into the broader question of how shifting positions shape memory and representation across generations within the same familial system.
Her project Nicolas & Adrien — initiated in 2005 and spanning two volumes — has led to exhibitions in the United States, France, Italy, Switzerland, China, and South Korea, as well as acquisitions by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and other major private collections. Her monograph Nicolas & Adrien I was published by Steidl in 2020. Nicolas & Adrien II (2019-2026), completing the twenty-year corpus, is forthcoming.
Her films include Teen Tribe (2010) and Summertime à Esparon (2023), which places four generations of family archive in dialogue with her own photographic work.
Fougeron is a mentor at the International Center of Photography and founder of The Photography Master Retreat, an annual intensive workshop in the south of France. Her editorial work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and The Guardian, among others.
Perpetually between Paris, New York and Esparon, she has made of that in-between her natural territory as she continues to work at the intersections of present time and memorial time, - exploring how the ideals of youth resonate -.