It starts today. The Île de Ré Photo Festival opens for its twelfth edition — running through July 9, fifty exhibitions, over 600 images, 800 m² at Le Bois-Plage. Free admission. The kind of festival built on the idea that photography shouldn’t be reserved for people who can afford a ticket.
This year, among the invited photographers: Grégory Herpe. And what he’s bringing back is something you don’t often see at photo festivals.
It all starts with a book. At the end of 2025, Grégory publishes Children of Cambodia with Dashbook Editions — a first reportage in Cambodia alongside the association Toutes à l’école, dedicated to girls’ education. Éric Piou, co-founder of the association Arkoun, buys the book. He sends Grégory an email. Grégory reads it, is moved. Éric tells him about Arkoun. He asks if he’d be up for joining them in Kampong Cham.
Grégory says yes. He always says yes when the human element is there.
Arkoun — “thank you” in Khmer — is a team of French orthopedic surgeons who travel every year to the public hospital of Kampong Cham to operate on patients who could never afford this kind of care. Mostly hip replacements. Coxarthroses, osteonecroses, fractured femoral necks that had quietly become fates. Over 200 patients treated since the beginning. The association was founded in La Rochelle by Dr. Cédric Bouquet, surgeon and president, Bertrand Millet-Barbé, and Éric Piou, surgical equipment specialist and treasurer-cofounder. In the operating room in Kampong Cham: Paul Brossard and Julien Nebout work side by side with their Cambodian counterparts.
Because that’s the real goal of Arkoun. Not just operating — teaching. Passing on the gesture, the technique, the confidence. Right up to that precise moment when you become unnecessary. Or rather: when you accept becoming so. Two Cambodian surgeons are now close to full autonomy. That’s the real measure of what they’ve built.
In March 2026, Grégory is in the operating room. Not in the corridor. Not in the waiting room with a cold coffee. In the OR — across some fifteen operations. Open bodies, the harsh light of surgical lamps, the taut silence of those operating and the absolute vulnerability of those lying there, trusting strangers to put their hip back together.
The kind of situation where you can’t fake anything. Not the people in front of you, not yourself.
What interests him is precisely what medicine doesn’t show. Not the shock image, not the surgical gore that sells magazines. The silence just before the first incision. The tension in a surgeon’s hands as he concentrates. The look on a patient’s face as they come back around, not yet knowing what just changed in their life. Those moments aren’t spectacular. They’re just true. And that’s much harder to photograph than blood.
“Éric, Cédric, Bertrand, Julien and Paul are fantastic people. So much empathy, dedication, big hearts, and a great sense of humor. The chemistry worked perfectly. I really hope to go back with them to keep documenting their remarkable commitment.”
Alongside these images from Cambodia, Grégory is also showing photographs taken across Vietnam — a different gaze, a different territory, a different kind of breathing within the same journey through Southeast Asia. Two series that speak to each other without resembling each other.
And on top of that, he shot a video documentary — his second, after Children Beyond the War, co-directed with his son Arthur Herpe about Ukrainian war orphans who fled to Moldova. Because some stories need to move, need voices, need silences that last.
This isn’t the first time Grégory Herpe has pointed his camera somewhere difficult. Ukrainian war orphans, abandoned Christian families in Lebanon, IRA fighters in Belfast, young girls pulled from child prostitution networks in Southeast Asia, the wars in Karabakh and Ukraine. He doesn’t try to prove anything in his pictures. He watches. He waits. He catches the moments when something shifts.
And then there’s this: Grégory is donating 100% of his print sales to Arkoun. Not a symbolic percentage. Everything. Which means that if you buy an image during the festival, you’re directly funding the next mission to Kampong Cham, the next operation for someone who had no other option.
Photography as action. Not decoration.
Perry Heeggor
Île de Ré Photo Festival — 12th Edition
June 27 – July 9, 2026 ·
Le Bois-Plage-en-Ré · Free admission
Grégory Herpe / Arkoun Exhibition — Cambodia Print sales in aid of the Arkoun association
gregoryherpephotographe on Instagram · gregoryherpe.com
Children of Cambodia — Dashbook Editions
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