Carolle Benitah is a French Moroccan photographer whose work focuses primarily on family, memories, and the passing of time. She often adds hand embellishment to old family snapshots such as embroidery, beading, and ink.

“Bénitah seeks to reinterpret her own history as daughter, wife, and mother.” ^{(Sous Les Etoiles Gallery. Carolle Benitah. Biography)}

Carolle Benitah’s portraits often obscures the faces of figures featured – she uses this to suggest estrangement and distance which she uses to reclaim her history and past. She works into very old photos of her which I think adds an sense of reflection to her work and growing older.

Carolle Benitah uses photomanipulation to distort the figures in her images and add things previously not there. “Through the trivial objects that I create and embroider, I overthrow the hierarchy of the arts.”  Benitah uses the common domestic practice of embroidery to combat how family and her individual experience should be looked at. Benitah’s use of domestic practices to show estrangement instead of close familial relationships that are often associated with embroidery and the passing down of such practice through generations – her use of photomanipulation is a mirror of her family life and isolation. She uses thread to represent her feelings on her childhood and complicated family relations rejecting expectations pushed on to her specifically from being a young girl in the 1970’s –

I want to use archive images in this same way to reflect on my past now with the hindsight of having grown older and moving away.