Tareck Raffoul’s photographic work is partly fashion, editorial and visual creation, with the same precision and originality in the situations he creates. Tareck Raffoul is a young photographer, video artist and art director living in France, but whose work is already international in scope, collaborating with a number of major brands and magazines.
His latest series of photographs, “Where do we go before we sleep?” presented at Galerie Nouchine Pahlevan last autumn, is based on a simple idea: how to represent the ramblings of the mind in that half-sleep moment of falling asleep. Perhaps more than that, it raises the question of the in-between, the passage between two states of body and mind. The images are strongly marked by a neon aesthetic, evoking a whole filmography from Nicolas Winding Refn to scenes from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. This aesthetic is also magnified in his latest editorials for Vogue Arabia and Louis Vuitton, adding to his ability to stage portraits through the interplay of the bodies themselves, and framing that plays on the off-camera, and the interactions between audience and model through the lens.
The space of sleep, the night, is also traditionally that of metamorphosis, a space outside time and social place. If the aesthetics and framing borrow from his experience of fashion photography, the models and interactions chosen by Tareck Raffoul offer bodily intimacies that play with these normative estheticizations. These moments of hollowing out and metamorphosis seem to recur in the photographer’s universe, literally in his “Ashes to Nature” series, where skin becomes the site of vegetal germination, and the framing cuts and distorts these bodies in renewal.
