Storytelling stills

On the Arte television channel this morning I caught a report about the photography of Mohamed Bourouissa. His narrative images are set up with as much care as a movie shoot. I find them very arresting and, yes, painterly. On the web there was this about the artist...

Mohamed Bourouissa’s photo series Périphérique stages moments of tension and the power relationships which exist within the ghetto-like suburbs of Paris. Although skirting a documentary aesthetic and using young inhabitants of the banlieues as subjects, the works are actually highly staged, often referencing painting.

He describes his photographs as deriving from an ‘emotional geometry’ – a way of placing a subject in space to create a moment of heightened tension, when anything, or nothing, could happen.

‘What he is premeditating here are the lines of force, the diagonals, the distance between figures, their integration into elements of the surroundings, the interplay of gazes, the rhythm of the image, the gesture, that provokes some kind of tension, one in the image, the other between documentary and fiction’
Magali Jauffret, Portfolio magazine, Nov 2007

Mohamed Bourouissa is a French artist born in Blida, Algeria, he completed his masters degree at the Sorbonne and is graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, he currently works and lives in Paris.

I find this relates to a blurring of the barrier between motion storytelling and still image stoprytelling which reflects the technology trend. Again the Canon Eos 5D Mk.II comes to mind.