"When you work with light, you work for somebody to feel this light", says French lighting designer and visual artist Thierry Dreyfus. "They fell it with their eyes and they feel it with their skin."

Over the years, his growing interest in light has driven him along a career path from assistant lighting designer at the Strasbourg Opera to the creator of imaginative fashion lighting for Yves Saint Laurent, Helmut Lang, John Galliano and other top designers in Paris, Milan, London and NYC. And over the past decade, he has also explored the interaction of light, materials and people in his art, product designs and on various interior lighting design projects.

Now based in Paris, Dreyfus's career in lighting began in the early eighties when he began working as an assistant lighting designer Hervé Audibert in the theatre and opera in Strasbourg. A change in career direction, and an important turning point in his life, came in 1985, when US fashion designer Patrick Kelly hired him to light one of his collections. Dreyfus left his theatre "family", entered the fashion world and "became a renegade", he says.

Although initially working with light "as an element of the scenery", Dreyfus says he soon developed a passion for it. "I felt the need for sharing with people this substance by itself, both its fragility and its incredible force and its beauty. Light became for me a real material".