Hard exclusive processes with photons

Virtual photons have proven to be very efficient probes of the hadronic structure, mostly through deep inelastic scattering and related processes. The advent of high luminosity lepton beams has allowed to enlarge the studied processes to hard exclusive reactions, such as deeply virtual Compton scattering and the electroproduction of mesons. We discuss theoretical progress which has lately been quite remarkable in this domain and first much encouraging experimental data.