Born on Réunion Island, Thierry Fontaine makes photographs he imagines by observing the shifting social models around him wherever he finds himself, these displacements generating encounters and new contacts whose crossings blend into mixings that alter established models and raise questions, improbable, antagonistic encounters made possible by the artist through staged situations, sculptures and specially made objects precisely arranged within a chosen context, then set up and photographed. His newest series, Les Joueurs, made for the Carte Blanche PMU and first shown at the Centre Pompidou, explores the world of gambling: in some thirty previously unseen images the artist shows what intimately drives the bettor, for Fontaine the gambler is an alchemist gifted, through imagination, with turning lead into gold.