Ben Dauchez - Orientalist #3

Format 33X60Unframed,
Orientalist Series – Marrakech
Fine Art Photography – Ben Dauchez

This work is part of a photographic approach that blends documentary photography, artistic composition, and the aesthetics of a travel notebook.

Inspired by Marrakech and its atmospheres, this creation gathers several fragments of life, faces, and urban scenes into a triptych composition. The black-and-white photographs dialogue with handwritten annotations in Arabic and French, red traces, imprints, sketches, and graphic elements evoking the pages of an old travel notebook.

The work plays with memory, time, and the richness of encounters. It evokes a city made of contrasts, movement, traditions, and suspended moments.

The artistic treatment, at the boundary between photography and collage, gives the whole the appearance of a personal document found, a sensitive archive where every detail tells a story.

A singular creation that invites the viewer to travel to the heart of Marrakech and to discover another reading of its visual and cultural identity.

Artist: Ben Dauchez
Title: Orientalist Series – Marrakech
Technique: Fine Art Photography, composition and multi-exposure
Format: 33x60 cm
Orientation: Horizontal

Thought of as a travel notebook page, the work takes as its starting point an original photograph by Ben Dauchez, to which elements are added that extend and transform the image. These interventions compose a narrative between memory, observation, and imagination. In a orientalist-inspired approach, the photography thus becomes the medium of a personal evocation of travel, where the real blends with reverie.

Ben Dauchez works his original photography like a travel notebook page. Writings, graphic motifs, and fragments of documents overlay the image, enriching the scene with traces and suggested stories. The blacks, ochres, and patinated reds evoke a material marked by time.
Inspired by Orientalism, this composition blends photographic gaze with the imagination of travel. Through a play of accumulations and erasures, it transforms the captured moment into a recomposed memory, meeting the real and dream.

Passionate about photography from a very young age, Ben DAUCHEZ started in the neighborhood studios of La Rochelle. There he acquired all the basics of traditional photography, from shooting to retouching through the darkroom. At 22, freshly graduated, he moved to Paris to complete his training by becoming a set assistant for Daguerre Studios, Le Petit Oiseau va sortir, and Studio Zéro. He had the chance to collaborate with and assist some of the most talented photographers: Bettina RHEIMS, Patrick DEMARCHELIER, Terry RICHARDSON, Ellen VON UNWERTH, Marcus MAM... From certain decisive encounters arose beautiful projects and long collaborations, notably with André RAU, Bettina RHEIMS (the sulfide exhibition INRI and its eponymous book at Editions Albin Michel) and Peter BEARD (2009 Pirelli calendar in Botswana).
His photos have been published, among others, by Condé Nast Editions (French and international), Première, Wallpaper, ID, Madame Figaro, Lifestyles, Dandy Magazine... His world also interests brands with very different identity codes, for which he has signed institutional and/or advertising campaigns such as Dior (beauty), L'Oréal, Peugeot, Philip Morris, and Burger King (Advertising awarded at the Dubai Lynx).

Ben DAUCHEZ has also shot numerous portraits of celebrities (IGGY POP, Woody HALLEN, Grace JONES, Jean DUJARDIN, Gilles LELLOUCHE, Olivier MARCHAL, Carole BOUQUET, Charlotte GAINSBOURG, ...) of beauty, influential men (Olivier DASSAULT, Jacques SEGUELA...) and travelers...
This photographic path has since allowed him to freely immortalize the human beauty, aesthetics, and spiritual essence of each personality.