Yelli (My Daughter)

Louisa Ben

2023 — France, Morocco

About this series

The story Yelli («my daughter» in Tamazight), in intimate connection with my own family cartography, explores the complex construction of identities based on the singular richness of a Franco-Moroccan heritage. Through portraits of young women my age, taken in film, I weave a choral story illustrating a generation tense between here and elsewhere.
I question here my Moroccan origins and throw a disorder in the territorial assignment and identity through the portraits of young women of North African origin living in France and Morocco. Playing with the ambiguity of places, the stripping of interiors, the modesty of what they show of themselves, I tried to avoid the risks of an orientalist vision.
And by silencing the names and places, I wanted to keep alive this questioning on a duality irreducible to any here or no elsewhere.

Photographer: Louisa Ben
Nationality: French – Moroccan
Based in: Paris, France
Website: www.louisaben.com
Instagram: @louisaben

Louisa Ben (Toulouse, France, 1996) is a french-moroccan photographer based in Paris.
She develops in her work a reflection around geographical memory and the construction of identity. Giving a central place to portraits, her approach to her subjects is marked by sobriety.
In her long-term documentary projects in France, Morocco and Colombia, she questions the relationship between territories and individuals with their environment.
She works also for the French press (M le magazine du Monde, L’Obs, Libération…), makes commissions and participates in exhibitions, in France and internationally.
In 2021, she is the winner of the second edition of the VU agency mentorship supported by the Fonds Régnier pour la création. The following year, she obtained the Création en cours grant from the Ateliers Médicis and, in parallel, became a laureate of the Banlieues Plurielles residency program thanks to which her work was exhibited at the Musée de l’Histoire Vivante in Montreuil (France).