About Carolle Bénitah

She was born in 1965 and is aged 58 years old. Bénitah lives in Marseille, France. She is a French Moroccan photographer, who worked for ten years as a fashion designer before turning to photography in 2001, and now explores memory, family and the passage of time.  Often pairing old family snapshots with handmade accents, such as embroidery, beading and ink drawings, Bénitah seeks to reinterpret her own history as daughter, wife, and mother.

She began to become interested in her family photographs when flipping through an album of her childhood. She felt overwhelmed by an emotion that she did not understand. The photographs taken 40 years ago awakened a fear of something that was familiar yet also so unknown, causing her to feeling the need to add meaning to the photos. She wanted to explore her identity in this way, to help her define and understand herself more.

Her Work

She uses achieve photographs that she reprints and manipulates them using embroidery and sometimes even cut outs bits of the photo. The pictures are simple snapshots, purely taken for memories, memories which clearly mean a lot to Bénitah, in both a negative and positive way. In my project, I want to embroider on both new and old photos, using the thread as a representation of my grandmother.

Carolle Bénitah: Photos Souvenirs

“To embroider my photograph, I make holes in the paper. With each stitch, I stick the needle through the paper. Each hole is a putting to death of my demons. It is like an exorcism. I stab the paper until I don’t hurt anymore”

-Carolle Bénitah

Her most popular series, Photos Souvenirs, is an exploration of her memories from her childhood in Morocco and was worked on between 2009 and 2014. This series is made up of old family achieves, which she manipulates by threading beads and embroidering designs relating to her feelings towards each photographic memories. She calls the photos she finds “excavations”, and she starts by transposing them onto new paper. She mostly uses red thread and beads, but some of her pieces also include gold and black coloured material. They add a shine to her photos, and each design holds significance. She sometimes even manipulates the photos in a more destructive way, cutting out individuals and placing them elsewhere. Photos Souvenirs was exhibited at Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, in 2015.

Growing up in a traditional Moroccan household, Bénitah was expected to do many typically- feminine tasks. The embroidery she adds to the achieves hold a lot of significance, portraying how she was taught to sew as a girl, and was expected to continue the activity for her entire life. She uses this to portray her distaste of being a good girl, a good wife and a loving mother. Embroidery in itself is a calm activity, however, Bénitah uses it to show her anger and other strong emotions.

Image Analysis

In this photograph, Bénitah is about six years old and holding hands with her smiling brother, but an army of cockroaches surrounds the children, and their hands are bound together in a ball of red wool. Bénitah used a red wool to create the wool and black, for the surrounding cockroaches.

The photo itself is a simple, staged photograph, with natural lighting illuminating the young children’s faces. It is taken from an eye level view, however slightly above the children, indicating an adult took the photo. The area of focus is the bright red wool and it leads the viewers attention to the centre of the piece. The bright white outfits further bring the audience’s attention to the centre, as the white contrasts against the dull grey background. The photo has a shallow depth of field, further promoting the idea that it is an amateur photo, a family snapshot. Furthermore, the photo has a simple composition, the children simply being in the centre of the photo, the subject of the image. The cockroaches add a repetitive look to the photo, creating a representation of Bénitah’s feelings towards that moment. The bugs could be a portrayal of a threat, the wool signifying that her and her brother helped each other through everything. The innocent look on the children’s faces contrasts with the bold colours and shapes of the embroidery. The red wool could be a representation of love, the love she had for her brother which is what made them so close. Or it could be a portrayal of violence or even blood, perhaps suggesting that they were simply close due to a problem in the world or because they are family (the idea of being connected by blood). It’s interesting how Bénitah in cooperates such strong emotions into simple photographs, softening these harsh emotions by creating beautiful embroidery with her needle. At the time, (mid-1900s) society was based on very traditional values. Growing up in a traditional, catholic, Moroccan household clearly positioned Bénitah to grow up and become your typical women. Her pieces are a representation of how she disagreed with this concept, and shows her anger through the manipulation of photos from her childhood.

“It’s like an exorcism. I pierce the paper until I have no more evil”

-Carolle Bénitah

This is one of Carolle Bénitah’s most significant quotes, since it portrays the thought that goes into her work. She uses the needle to embroider her anger into the work, instead of keeping it bottled up inside. This is very inspiring, and I like the idea of conveying emotions through embroidery, both on new and old photos.

Carolle Bénitah’s link to Nostalgia

“I selected snapshots because they are linked to memory and loss”

-Carolle Bénitah

I think Carolle Bénitah’s work has a big link to nostalgia, however she shows both the negative and positive aspects of it through her art. She uses the embroidery as a healing ritual and calm her inner child. She also feels a mix of emotions when looking at the photos, which I think represents nostalgia perfectly, as I don’t think nostalgic feelings have to be completely positive.