Albrecht Becker I Like This Pain

Hervé Joseph Lebrun is a photographer and filmmaker. He has primarily worked on the deportation of homosexuals. He collaborated with Albrecht Becker, one of the last German survivors of the persecution of homosexuality for 4 years between 1998 and 2002. He wrote De Pierre et de Seel (2000) with Pierre Seel, the first survivor of the persecution of homosexuality in France to have testified openly. From 2010 to 2017, he was the director of the Paris LGBTQI film festival Chéries-Chéris.

Lebrun is also a specialist of 70s French pornography, he studies and safeguards the work of François About, Norbert Terry, Jacques Scandelari, Jean-Étienne Siry, Wallace Potts, Anne-Marie Tensi, Benoît Archenoul, Francis Savel and Jean-Michel Sénécal. He made the full length documentary film Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the ’70s (2014) which was screened at the San Francisco Frameline (2014), at the Geneva Everybody’s Perfect Festival, at LUFF in Lausanne, at Queer Lisboa (2014), at the Guadalajara international film festival (2015). Lebrun has made 12 experimental short films, amongst them Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker (2004), 8 min, Le Nicoeur (The Heartscrewer) (2005), 17 min and Possession (2007), 24 min.

Lebrun has had exhibitions of his work across Brussels, Berlin and Zagreb and his exhibitions have been the subject of publications. These exhibitions include: Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker, Galerie Guillemites 9 (Paris: 1999); Mon beau gars l’est, Guillaume Dustan (Sujet Dustan: Sodomie électrique), Pause-Lecture (Paris: 2000); Libidinal Motion / Diary of an Innocent, Albrecht Becker’s autoportraits, Delmes & Zander (Cologne: 2018), Albrecht Becker. No Love Without Pain, Independent Art Fair, Delmes & Zander, (New York: 2019); the collective exhibition Champs d’amours, 100 ans de cinéma arc-en-ciel (Hôtel de Ville, Paris, June – September 2019) and When We Were Monsters, photomontages of Albrecht Becker, collective exhibition with curator James Richards (Haus Mödrath – Räume für Kunst, Kerpen, Germany: February 2021 – June 2022).