Didier Ben Loulou

Didier Ben Loulou

December 3, 1998 - January 2, 1999

Between Shadow and Light

I know him solely through his color photographs, intimately linked with the city of Jersalem. I know only of his anxious questioning and his desires to portray the inextricable overlap between man and territory. In this elusive city, politically and physically divided into religious and ethnic partitions, Didier Ben Loulou seeks to unite, through color, enduring imprints and fleeting shadows. In the breach created when a moment of time in the memory of the Eternal city is captured, the image wavers between sharp focus and a fleeting blur. Places whose stories are fossilized in the gleam of stone, in careless traces of chalk and absorbing shadow vie with flowing gestures, turning heads or swerving bodies. The unavoidable rupture between the permanent and the transient dictates the way Didier Ben Loulou places color within his frame, as if the photograph's coherence were dependent on the rift created by this dissociation. -Jacques Py