Henry Roy – Impossible Island

Henry Roy blends dream, observation, imagination, and poetic resistance in a career survey spanning four decades. Loose Joints is proud to present the first monograph exploring forty years of innovative Franco-Haitian artist Henry Roy's sublime photographic practice. Published in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), Impossible Island brings together photography, text, and video to immerse readers in Roy's world of interconnected dreams, where time, place, and memory flow together. Roy’s works, spanning his native Haiti, France, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand, Tunisia, and beyond, build a photographic worldview influenced by French modernism, New Wave aesthetics, creolization, and Haitian spiralisme . Through his sun-kissed style and animistic sensibility, Roy grants agency to all forms of life, creating transcendent moments that transcend time and place. His images evoke layered narratives that reject imperialist frameworks, inviting viewers to linger, embrace wonder, and explore the boundaries of the visible, rich with poetic and philosophical depth. Impossible Island delicately sequences Roy's career of refined images into a kind of open-ended story- telling, accompanied by evocative, poetic texts by the artist and an essay by curator Robert Cook to redefine as a relational and transformative force, offering an enduring vision of interconnectedness and renewal Roy’s career survey Henry Roy – Impossible Island draws on 40-years of recollections and observations, bringing together 113 photos taken from 1983-2023 at The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 30 November 2024–18 May 2025. Henry Roy was born in 1963 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and moved to Paris with his family at the age of three where he has remained. He studied photography in Paris and has been active since the early 1980s. Roy’s work has been published in major international journals such as Vogue Paris, Purple Journal, Purple Fashion, Air France Magazine, AD, W Magazine, Harper's Bazaar UK, Artreview, M Le Monde, L'Officiel Voyage, Apartamento, Hobo, and IntranQu'îllités. He has produced six artist books since 1998. Co-published by Loose Joints and the Art Gallery of Western Australia Section-sewn debossed hardcover with tip-on 160 pages, 220 x 250 mm, 75 colour plates Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon with an accompanying text by Robert Cook LJ208, 978-1-912719-63-1 Press: M Le Monde The Observer New Review Financial Times Another Magazine De Groene Amsterdammer Brutus Events: Paris launch, Thursday 30 January 2025, Delpire & co