If there is one who has always had Tunisia in his goal, it is the photographer Mrad Ben Mahmoud. For 40 years, he has been poking around corners of the country in search of the right light, the authentic cliché, the generous smile, a Tunisia at hand or within reach of the heart. Amel DJAIT
Objectif Tunisie is a book of love and friendship. A book of more than 150 pages, carried by passion and which traces 40 years of photos without tricks or make-up of the photographer Mrad Ben Mahmoud for whom “the beautiful is the moment”.
This book is simple as we like. Without complications or worry of excessive aesthetics, it is tasted like a family memory and is a testimony of a past always present and witness a certain future. It is “an invitation to travel. The choice of photos retraces the itinerary of a photographer who gives us to contemplate a unique and plural Tunisia. It offers us an initiatory journey through space and time, a real hunger- crossed between past and present “.
Objective Tunisia has this valuable. It looks like this Tunisia that we all carry in us. The photos of Mrad Ben Mahmoud tell about landscapes, board games, emotions, memories, bits of history and life … Photos that tell a country, its own country.
Objectif Tunisie, he can trace more than 40 years of photographs of Mrad Ben Mahmoud? Difficult! Because his images have always accompanied us. The images of Ben Mahmoud accompanied, through books, postcards, promotional campaigns of the Tunisian National Office of Tourism (ONTT) and films, Tunisia and its promotion.
His entire career, Mrad Ben Mahmoud has proposed images more than he imposed. His vision of Tunisia, he shares with generosity and commitment. Objectif Tunisie is a “symbolic act of memory” much more than a reappropriation that one could understand.
In a beautiful preface, Jean Pierre Krief writes that “the great American photographer Diane Arbus said:” A photograph is a secret about a secret.” If there is one for whom Tunisia is and will remain a secret, is Mrad Ben Mahmoud whose secret, is, precisely, his eyes constantly amazed by Tunisia
