Didier Ben Loulou carries out his « archaelogical research » in Jerusalem, a three thousand year old city, almost a microcosm in itself. It is a painstaking and precise quest aimed at piercing the veneer of this almost make-believe biblical city in order to give us a glimpse of its - sometimes disconcerting- reality.

Similar to the way in which the writer remodels language by bringing a new meaning to common words, in his photographs, Didier Ben Loulou works with the everyday elements of this city, rearranging them in a way that opens our eyes, prompting us to look at Jerusalem in a new light.

The images are presented in fragmentary form - a face, a wall, a shadow - which, greatly enlarged, change the meaning of the initial subject, giving it a surprisingly different and unexpected appearance.

The familiar becomes strange. The change of viewpoint distorts our perception of the subject, tricking the eye and disorientating the onlooker. This disorientation induces a different, interstitial space in which can appear a radical « otherness », not unlike an hallucination. In this space, I see the city in a totally new way, I see « the other » in a totaly new way. The images create what is virtually a Copernican revolution, off-centring the subject, making room for the unknown and the invisible as they take over the centre of the image.

In this way, Didier Ben Loulou invites us to overstep appearances, obliging us to abandon the range of clichés traditionally associated with this city. Deprived of usual references, our gaze grasps a different, more sensitive, reality of the city which, although less palpable, contains its essence.

How does one reveal the mystery of Jerusalem ? How can one photograph that which is in fact the city's essential identity, when this identity, made of up of heterogeneous elements, is simultaneously singular and multiform ? This multiplicity, this mosaic of differences, is what weaves the unique identity of a city that is the centre and the crossroads of a history of manking written in words of fire.

A search for the One necessarily becomes a search for the Other, the different, a fundamental otherness which defines me as a subject and which resonates like a wound.

This is the research in which Didier Ben Loulou is involved; it is this wound which I see in his images. Jerusalem revisited reveals me to myself, brings to light my most intimate and secret confines wherein fear and death coexist with life. And yet, I am reconciled with the other - the outsider- in myself, and of whom I finally catch a glimpse.