Scarlett Coten
All visuals Mectoub Series
About:
Scarlett Coten is a photographer who lives in Paris and works in North Africa and the Middle East. After studying photography at the ENSP in Arles, she regularly publish in national and international press.
In 2000, Coten achieved her first photographic series in the Sinai desert, Her full immersion in the Bedouin society, during almost 3 years, and her attachment for the people and their story, give her work a unique and remarkable intimacy. In 2004 it was awarded the Humanity Photo Award in Beijing, China, and in 2009 nominated at the NYPH Festival in the Book category.
Since 2012, Scarlett Coten captures men in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Palestine, particularly the young urban generation who, since 2011, not only demand more individual freedom, but expose themselves in the intimacy of a face to face, and challenge the western world vision we have of the Arab man.
“Mectoub” was made possible thanks to a carte blanche given by Mr Jean-Luc Monterosso for the PhotoMed festival (France), and thanks to residencies supported by the French institute of Tangiers and Fès (2012), Cairo and Alexandria (2013), and currently Ramallah (2014).(text Gallery Ibrahim)
Mectoub Series
In the shadows of the Arab Spring
An unfulfilled love story had left me feeling fragile and this new work was to be an intimate journey. Lasting three years, it took me from North Africa to the Middle East, in order to look into male identity. I set off to further my travels into countries which had long since been close to my heart, Morocco, Egypt and beyond. Algiers, Beirut, Ramallah… I walk through the city from streets to alleyways, cafés to backyards, searching. Hidden places, abandoned houses, forgotten shorelines, these are the places where men will come, at my invitation, for a photographic tête-à-tête. I want to photograph them in all their complexity, fragility, sensuality and freedom. My photographs explore the reality of these regions from a personal standpoint. I stage them, with traces, documentary aspect and pose, enabling me to blend testimony with intimacy.
The “Mectoub” series, always interlacing portraits with places, questions concepts of desire, masculinity, identity, territory, and history. They do so in the context of societies in which issues of individual freedom, gender and sexuality form part of the aspirations at the root of the widespread changes currently sweeping across these countries. (texts website photographer)(courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery)