Marrakesh-based Gallery 127 celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The occasion to organize an exclusive exhibition of works from the Jean Marc Tingaud Collection which includes Moroccan portraits from the Douamna Studio. This exhibition is also part of the Marrakesh Biennale.
The Douamna Studio opened its doors in the 1930s in Riad Bahia Salam in Marrakesh, between Jemaa el-Fnaa marketplace and the Bahia Palace, where just a few yards away and several years earlier Gabriel Veyre taught photography to the young sultan Moulay Abd El Aziz.
Located in the main thoroughfare of the Medina quarter, the Studio enjoyed privileged exposure. Customers came to have black-and-white portraits taken, generally ID photos, or sometimes brought their family pictures to have them enlarged, retouched, and hand-tinted. The photographer-craftsman would let his imagination run wild and add decorative motifs in the background , interpret the colors of garments and jewels, and eagerly touch up the complexions of faces offered up to his paintbrush and his mood.
The new image would then be displayed with ostentation in the lobby of a Moroccan home: the original photograph would have been practically obliterated to make room for an idealized portrait that was to accompany the family … for eternity. Photographic retouching was already well established: the intention was clearly to “disappear” the photographic portrait and replace it with a painted portrait.
If studio photography plays a key role in the history of Moroccan photographic production, it is because it offers a sort of inventory of Moroccan “identities” as seen by Moroccans themselves, as opposed to “Orientalist” photographs, often reductive, sometimes condescending, and taken mainly by foreign photographers.
The 27 portraits “preserved” by Jean-Marc Tingaud date back to the 1950s and 60s.
J.M Tingaud
EXHIBITION
Moroccan portraits from the Douamna Studio
From February 24th to March 15th, 2016
Dans le cadre de la Biennale de Marrakech
Galerie 127
127, Avenue Mohammed V,
Marrakech,
Morocco
T : 00212(0) 524 43 26 67
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http://www.galerienathalielocatelli.com
