Didier Ben Loulou lives between Paris and Jerusalem.
He stays for the first time in Tel Aviv from 1981 to 1989 and keeps there a kind of photographic catalogue of the urban and maritime space. At the same time, he discovers a place, near the city, less busy but maybe more mysterious, with regard to its configuration and its influence: Jaffa and the ruined neighborhood of Ajami. Didier Ben Loulou will wait more than twenty years before dedicating a book to it and thus revealing a hidden aspect of Israel’s memory. This book, Jaffa, is published in 2006, accompanied by an account from Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville.
In 1993, he decides to settle in Jerusalem which has become since then the foundation stone of his artistic work. The maze of the old town, the diversity and plurality of its origins represent the territory explored by the photographer. Wandering within this human complexity, showing an intense curiosity, a careful and lucid sensitivity, Didier Ben Loulou draws the portrait of a changing city with multiple boundaries.
Didier Ben Loulou and Emmanuel Levinas paths’ meet on the occasion of two publications: the first time in 1996 when Bruno Roy, for the publishing house Fata Morgana, proposes him to accompany the beautiful text of the philosopher, “Violence du visage”, with photographs; then in 2004, when he publishes “Sincérité du visage” whose text is written by Catherine Chalier, a great exegete of the thinker of otherness. This book, which is part of the levinasian tradition, opens nevertheless new perspectives on the interpretation of faces; the more ambiguous faces reveal the corruption of looks and, a less obvious one, the corruption of principles, which generates a sequence of preconceived ideas on good and evil. Writing has always flirted with the work of Didier Ben Loulou until it joined it fully within a patient work on letters, mainly conducted on the steles of Safed cemetery and of the Mount of Olives. The photographer travels all over the world as a reader searching for signs. The letter finds its place in its work, under all its forms of expression: from the most sacred Hebraic inscriptions to the most profane posters covering the walls of Jerusalem, or tags on the Arab alleyways. Indeed, the letter transcends both categories, the sacred and the profane, to reach the philosophical sphere, a kind of link uniting men together, dead or alive. From 2006 to 2009, he works on a new project on Athens: the travellers mixing to mass immigration, the encounter between the Third and the Fourth World on the outskirts of the capital.
Winner of the prize Villa Médicis hors les murs, Didier Ben Loulou received a scholarship from Fiacre (Contemporary Art Fund) and was given an award by the European Association for Jewish Culture, Visual Arts Grant, Paris/London.