Sami Benhadj

Awarded

Sami Benhadj

Various photo researches and a video clip

Graphic Design

Patterns of Lightness
Sami Ben­hadj, a mem­ber of Körner Union, has al­ready made a name for him­self in­ter­na­tion­ally in the world of pho­tog­ra­phy. His clients in­clude the 'New York Times Mag­a­zine', 'Wall­pa­per', 'Wire Mag­a­zine', 'Le Monde' and Vitra. His works have been pre­sented in many ex­hi­bi­tions both in Switzer­land and abroad.
Sami Ben­hadj re­ceives this award for a se­ries of com­mis­sioned pho­tographs cre­ated in the past two years and for the 'sou­venir de chine' music video pro­duced for the band Larytta, which is also part of this se­ries. All the works demon­strate Ben­hadj's in­ter­est in pre­sent­ing ob­jects in a new and ex­per­i­men­tal way. The mir­ror plays an im­por­tant role as a com­po­si­tional tool. Dou­bled, mul­ti­plied, mir­rored on an axis: ob­jects turn into brightly coloured kalei­do­scopic pat­terns.
In the work com­mis­sioned for the mag­a­zine 'An­other Man', ties, wal­lets, shoes and belts are mir­rored on an axis, seem­ingly freed from the forces of grav­ity, to cre­ate a geo­met­ric pat­tern. The mir­ror­ing ef­fect is taken still fur­ther in the pho­tographs for the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Grants 2007 cat­a­logue. Here, the award-win­ning de­signs are pho­tographed four­fold from above, from a cus­tom-built scaf­fold­ing, and then com­bined to cre­ate a sin­gle image. Only on closer in­spec­tion does one no­tice tiny vari­a­tions in de­tail, in­di­cat­ing that each in­di­vid­ual piece was man­u­ally po­si­tioned on the ground four times. In the age of Pho­to­shop, such a time-con­sum­ing pro­ce­dure is re­mark­able.
The music video shows var­i­ous crea­tures – mice, ca­naries, chick­ens – rush­ing to­wards a mir­rored cor­ner, only to dis­cover that there is no way out. This ri­otous arrange­ment of an­i­mals to the rhyth­mic beat of the music cre­ates a fas­ci­nat­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion of sym­met­ric move­ment.
The often com­plex and time-con­sum­ing in­stal­la­tions that un­der­lie the com­po­si­tions are not vis­i­ble in the pho­tographs. As Sami Ben­hadj notes, it is first and fore­most a ques­tion of fo­cus­ing all at­ten­tion on the ob­ject it­self and al­low­ing a cer­tain am­bi­gu­ity to leave its mark on the image. By en­list­ing min­i­mal but care­fully de­lib­er­ated means to com­pose his pic­tures, he suc­ceeds in cre­at­ing strong and com­pelling im­ages, en­rich­ing con­tem­po­rary ob­ject pho­tog­ra­phy with fresh and in­no­v­a­tive ap­proaches and re­mark­able ideas.
Aurelia Müller

Sami Benhadj
Born in
1977
Education
designer HES en communication visuelle
Group name
Körner Union