Didier Ben Loulou

Didier Ben Loulou (born 29 May 1958), is a Franco-Israeli photographer.
Bibliography.
Didier Ben Loulou was born on 29 May 1958 in Paris, France. He moved to Israel at the beginning of the 1980s, where he worked on a first project, "Israel Eighties", a series of images in black and white.
In the next two decades, Didier Ben Loulou undertook a vast project on towns and cities, a collection of portraits under the format of a "photographic repertoire" of urban geographies. In the historical port of Jaffa and the Ajami Neighbourhood, he observed the comings and goings of populations, their exile and asylum. His focus moved to Jerusalem between the two Intifadas (1991-2008), cornerstone of his work, where he explored the meanders of a city with multiple borders, filled with violence and the sacred. A book, "Jérusalem: 1991-2006", was published in 2008.
Didier Ben Loulou questioned the spiritual and the invisible again in a series of images on the Hebrew letters, the Aleph-Bet transcending the sacred and the profane, to establish a bond between the living and the dead (2012).
He travelled along the Mediterranean coast, to cities and landscapes, in search of the meaning of wandering. From 2006 to 2008, he photographed gypsies mingling with migrants in Athens, merger of the Third and the Fourth Worlds on the outskirts of the capital. Since then, Didier Ben Loulou has been leading a nomadic existence between Jerusalem, Marseille, Jaffa, Athens, Tanger, Palermo, Safed, Thessaloniki and Ajaccio.
From 2006 to 2019, he finalized a project on Corsica "(Sanginaires)", quintessence, according to him, of the Mediterranean. He examined the notion of re-enchantment and the possibility of happiness in a chaotic world. "I simply want to be the bearer of what is revealed to me, silently and in secret".
The square format and colours are all-important features of his work, as well as the Fresson process used to print his analogue images since 1979.
He is a Villa Medici Hors les Murs laureate (1995) and the recipient of a Fiacre (French Ministry of Culture) scholarship (1997).
Didier Ben Loulou is the author of about twenty books, including two journals and reflections on his approach, "Chroniques de Jérusalem et d’ailleurs" (2016), "Un Hiver en Galilée" (2018), and "Mise au Point" with Fabien Ribery (2019).
His works are regularly exhibited in Europe and the United States. "The Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives" (IMEC) is the repository of his private archives since 2007.
Gallery.
Fresson Prints.