A TRAVERS LES CÔTES (1999)

The Tunisian photographer Hichem Driss (b. 1968) likes to experiment. He uses different photographic techniques and various, often antique cameras. For instance, since 1999 he has worked considerably with the camera obscura (also called a pinhole camera), an apparatus from the earliest days of photography – in fact, nothing more than a box with a hole in it. There is no lens, which produces photographs of a very different sort. They are less sharp, creating a softer image, and they often exhibit distortions in perspective. Those are qualities that Driss finds ideal for his experiments. For A TRAVERS LES CÔTES he photographed the north coast of his native land. He chose to do this on days when the wind was strong and the sea rough, in order to achieve the most spectacular results. ‘Thanks to the camera obscura I can produce images that the human eye would never be able to see’, explains Driss, who has been working as a freelance photographer in Paris since 2002.