Étiquette : Douraïd Souissi

Douraïd Souissi discovered photography as an art form in the United States where he graduated with a bachelor’s in international finance and a master’s in philosophy. While slowly developing his compositional and technical skills, using mostly black and white film, he got interested in the works of Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, which he admired not only for their rigor and simplicity but also for their effective use of the medium’s ability to observe the world more closely and offer radical new ways to reinterpret it.

Moving back to his native Tunisia, he quickly found himself solicited to shoot portraits and promotional assignments allowing him to further perfect his craft, especially the use of light in and outside of the studio, while meeting and collaborating with many of the country’s young artists, designers and other creative talents.

In the past few years, he set out to explore Tunisia’s less traveled and often forgotten regions producing series of images in Kef, Siliana, Kerkennah, Qayrawan and reflecting on the artistic value and potential of visual representation and the landscape tradition from Renaissance paintings to the New Topographics and beyond. Recently, he started working on a series of portraits that depict ordinary Tunisian men looking down with their backs turned to the camera while surrounded by an unusually large and empty dark space.

His work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibitions across Tunisia as well as other countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Qr’n, produced in 2015 and exhibited at the Tunis-based Galerie AGorgi and subsequently Talan, attests to his increasing openness and desire to explore and experiment with photography’s infinite possibilities, which extend far beyond its craft.