Born in 1966 in Paris
Mat Jacob makes a commitment at the beginning of the 90s in the documentary photography with for luggage of the questions in perpetual suspense which give to its work the aspect of a lively interrogation into the world.
Between 1993 and 1999, he travelled throughout the world – Haiti, Cuba, Hong-Kong, China, Vietnam, Canada, the United States, Mexico – in parallel of the photographer Olivier Culmann, to put a glance crossed on the school worldwide. He investigates these places of the childhood where build up personalities, future submissions and possible rebellions.
Follows the first one of six journeys in Chiapas, between 1995 and 2005, in the striking Indian communities. This Mexican peregrination becomes the support of an asserted photographic mode: between documentary and suggestion. In Chiapas, the photographer says the run-up of people resisting as much as he looks for the Indian and peasant identity.
His documentary on the Zapatista March was awarded the 3rd 2002 World Press Photo Prize for the category “General News”, after which it was published by the Atlantica Editions.
He then covered alter-globalization movements and also went to Israel and Palestine to make a documentary on the occupied territories.
In 2007, he is welcomed in residence by the Atlantic Center of the Photography of Brest. This photographic road in Finistère, a familiar and family territory, is pretext in a set of comings and goings between its current meetings and its memory. The finistérien journey feeds a journey internal and made re-appear the images of past. China, Russia, Palestine, Latin America: in these dotted lines of life, places of the raw curiosity, are based by new quests and by future questionings.
He took part in the making of the book Photojournalisme, à la croisée des chemins (Marval-CFD Edition) which was given special credits by the jury of the 2005 Nadar Prize.
Since 2003 he has also been co-organizing photojournalistic professional trainings at the EMI-CFD.