Mehdi Ait El Mallali

Mehdi Ait El Mallali

Mehdi Ait El Mallali is a self-taught Moroccan photographer based in Paris. Emerging from the meditative cartography of the Atlas Mountains, his practice now veers toward introspective and socio-spatial inquiry. Informed by a cinematic gaze and an ethics of observation, his work privileges stillness and attunement, where light functions as both emotive register and conceptual filament.

Mehdi Ait El Mallali is a self-taught Moroccan photographer based in Paris. Emerging from the meditative cartography of the Atlas Mountains, his practice now veers toward introspective and socio-spatial inquiry. Informed by a cinematic gaze and an ethics of observation, his work privileges stillness and attunement, where light functions as both emotive register and conceptual filament.

Instagram

Website

Instagram

Website

Mehdi Ait El Mallali’s photographic corpus carries a cinematographic cadence that resists facile mimicry, conjuring instead the protracted sequentiality of auteurs like Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr. His images are not isolated indexes of the visible but suspended loci — sites where affect precedes interpretation, presence outruns narrativity, and light accrues heft.

Grounded in contemplative stasis, his practice favors an aesthetics of dilated temporality and tonal subtlety. Here, light isn’t simply a means of seeing but an apparatus of interiority: faint flickers, undulating refractions — each soliciting a longer look and gesturing toward a veracity past representational plenitude.

Mehdi Ait El Mallali’s photographic corpus carries a cinematographic cadence that resists facile mimicry, conjuring instead the protracted sequentiality of auteurs like Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr. His images are not isolated indexes of the visible but suspended loci — sites where affect precedes interpretation, presence outruns narrativity, and light accrues heft.

Grounded in contemplative stasis, his practice favors an aesthetics of dilated temporality and tonal subtlety. Here, light isn’t simply a means of seeing but an apparatus of interiority: faint flickers, undulating refractions — each soliciting a longer look and gesturing toward a veracity past representational plenitude.

Dom Pérignon vineyards from the sky
Dom Pérignon vineyards from the sky
Dom Pérignon vineyards from the sky
Dom Pérignon vineyards from the sky
Vine leaf
Vine leaf

Rather than spinning linear narratives, Ait El Mallali traces landmarks through affective adjacency and spatial intimation, sidestepping archival fixity and subverting genre taxonomies to instantiate a poetics of sustained attention — an intuitive reciprocity between self and milieu.

Rather than spinning linear narratives, Ait El Mallali traces landmarks through affective adjacency and spatial intimation, sidestepping archival fixity and subverting genre taxonomies to instantiate a poetics of sustained attention — an intuitive reciprocity between self and milieu.

Browse More

Browse More

Nana Kwadwo Agyei Addo

v

Mehdi Ait El Mallali

v

Maame Abena Osaah Asamoah

v

Morgan Steyaert

v

Aleruchi Kinika

v

David Armah Ashitei

v

Michael Acheampong

v

Temiloluwa Johnson

v

Nana Kwadwo Agyei Addo

v

Mehdi Ait El Mallali

v

Maame Abena Osaah Asamoah

v

Morgan Steyaert

v

Aleruchi Kinika

v

David Armah Ashitei

v

Michael Acheampong

v