There is a secret fraternity in the faces Didier Ben Loulou photographs, a fraternity not at all dependant on a steadfast desire to celebrate human bonds but one which, despite the passions which torment the inhabitants of Jerusalem with often tragic consequences, is to be found at the heart of an extreme solitude. A solitude which fills space but does not orientate it, at least not yet. Even if on rare occasions a patch of sky or background, usually indistinct, may recall the distant presence of nature, of the world at large, this never opens up a perspective or horizon from which to look at these faces. But, conversely, neither do they invite us to perceive any particular reality from the perspective of their chiaroscuro, so everything exterior to them seems de facto unimportant. Yet this is not self-evident since these faces, do not spring from nowhere. They are still to be encountered today in Jerusalem, the photographer insists: on long walks through the Old City, if one goes down alleys where the sun never reaches, ventures into often dilapidated courtyards peopled by beings seemingly about to utter an unbearable moan but also, incomprehensibly, with an incredible vivacity. The faces Didier Ben Loulou photographs have an ardent, proud, terrible, pitiless history which, far from chilling the city to the bone, keeps it perpetually on the alert.

At first sight, these faces plead no cause, not even their own. Attempting to discern in them the transient or physical traits supposed to characterize a Jew, Christian or Muslim is as impossible as it is vain. And this matters little. The photographer is not judging a face, merely ‘stopping’ it – unless, that is, it is the face which gently or brutally imperatively stops him before darkness gets the better of his fragile and incommensurable presence in any communal destiny. But if the face asserts itself like this, if it prevents one from looking away at something else, if it occupies virtually the whole space, this is not because the photographer has effectively put its context to one side, forgotten about the traders’ stalls, shouts, smells and hustle bustle which fill the side streets (and also forgotten the scares which often clear them) in order to better train his camera on it. It is because the face, whether dark and grainy-skinned with age or worn by suffering one senses is tragic, unconsciously imposes silence around it, without wanting or even daring to explicitly demand this. The eyes of these faces are unaware of the photographer. They are almost always inward-trained, looking into an inner world one surmises is haunted by the trials and tribulations of a life that has known no rejoicing, by an insatiable and overwhelming distress, or by premature familiarity with cruelty. Silent eyes. An occasional thumb damaged by menial daily chores pressed into a cheek, a broken fingernail casting a frail clarity on an eye socket, the palm of a hand banishing the dazzling sun, or grubby fingers violently, almost insolently touching the mouth, either constraining it to silence or in an expression of terror. That glint which enlivens human eyes has not disappeared, but is now to be glimpsed only unexpectedly, in a furtive, almost malicious look, in the almost on-its-last-legs wisdom of an old man, or from beneath the blue headscarf of a woman whose severe features condemn resignation and refuse appeasement. It is as if the repetition of man’s deadly games had either deprived it of all gentleness or it held it deep down inside, to the extent of no longer knowing whether one could give into to it or not, in order to no longer weep and remain safe.

These faces, therefore, almost always know nothing of laughter and tears. The photographer does not allow himself the easiness of capturing them in an instant when they have consented to the exhilaration or impiety of pleasures which, disdaining the wounds of the world, assert the pure delight of still being there, albeit unhealed and without hope. Nor does he ever give in to that supremely undemanding temptation to incite compassion or subjugate by immodestly showing too visible tears or weeping that is inconsolable because irreconcilable with forgiving life for going on regardless. Yet sometimes in his work a flicker of a smile or eyes closed under the effect of a fleeting feeling of appeasement or mute exhilaration make a stab at a timid eulogy to life. A eulogy that will immediately disappear, though, no doubt excusing itself for its audacity, making way for the authoritarian opprobrium of dark days to come – as if these will never stop coming to claim their due, even from young lives whose skin already bears virile, distressing scars, or from old people whose nostrils or mouth are still trembling from too much harsh existence while their eyes are already communing with obscurity and absence.

The photographer’s fervour is always severe. He seeks neither to move us nor catch our attention by conventional or ritual poses, the poses which perpetuate that iconic image of Jerusalem which many people have come to expect in pictures of the city, so much so, perhaps, that they find pictures which deny them this comforting, numbing tranquillity disturbingly strange. Didier Ben Loulou also refuses to exhibit photographs whose effects – connivance with or sympathy for their evidently moving content or the facile identification which they induce – can be calculated in advance. But if he refrains from doing so it is precisely because looking at a face or showing it in a picture is never the equivalent of looking at what one expected and even less identifying oneself with it under the pretext that one recognises someone with the same religion or race as one’s own. On the contrary, it is to be kept alert by a profound enigma, whether it has the pleasant colours and feeling of unchanged childhood, an enigma that will remain unsolvable, whether it comes from Jerusalem or whether one has contemplated that face for a long time. Lastly, since the art of the photographer never aims to idealise what the eye sees, nor does it seek to soften the spectacle of fatigue and misery or water down face-to-face confrontation with the bitter, searing but also noble and intimidating marks left by desolation on the fragile flesh of faces worn by time and proximity to despair. He shows all that because, no doubt, all that imposed itself on him, caught him off guard, without him having the time or desire to protect himself.

If it happens that a dark skinned and prominently veined hand, an old, vulnerable and beautiful hand alights on a book, the forms of whose slightly effaced text suggest that it is a Hebraic Bible, this is obviously not to inject a touch of tradition into the heart of his work – one which would reassure by introducing a recognisable reference. It is because, it seems that the hand, or the neck lowered in the grip of merciless hands, or the calloused palm sheltering sensitive or watchful eyes unable to bear the brilliant light, also say something about the face. True, it is eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, forehead, hair, eyelashes, eyebrows which habitually characterise what we call a face, but a hand or a neck can sometimes also have their say. The face still rebels against being reduced to the elements supposed to compose it. Not just because it is more than them all together, because in its eyes one reads the suffering and grandeur of those who defy the nevertheless inevitable fate of the living, but also and above all because it is impossible to assign the face a precise and definitive place in the topography of the body. And so it happens that the face takes refuge in a hand or embeds itself into a neck to seek attention.

Conversely, and for the same reasons, Didier Ben Loulou often photographs part or a fragment of a face: lips and nostrils on which, without warning, he imposes an insistent and inevitably disturbing proximity; an eye, eyebrows and a few cheek hairs suggesting, with a certain tenderness, a man haunted by the need to still keep watch; or the shadow of eyelashes on a cheek with a beauty spot, suggesting a period of fitful sleep, a truce in the trials and struggles of life; or a fingernail as luminous as it is dirty, ready to gouge the eye on which it is pressing too hard, indicating an unbearable surplus of lassitude or terror. But these facial fragments, this obsession with details, this need to get into the very pigments of the skin, to the point of rendering it almost tangible, signify the face with as much if not more power than if it were shown in its completeness, from a distance. Just as, to the attentive observer, a hand or neck are like a face because they also express anguish, anger, distress or haughty rancour, a minute, solitary detail of a face speaks volumes of that long dread which inevitably haunts men. Even when they seek to jettison it on others, on those whom they like to think would bear it for them, even when they try by all possible means, including murder, to offer it sacrificially on the altar of their brooding passions.

But if what we call a face is never a simple clear-cut entity, localisable on a precise part of the body, on which one can easily enumerate each of the elements comprising it, it is because the disquiet integral to the face is equally difficult to locate. It is exuded by every pore of wounded skin, it radiates from fingers hungry for tenderness, from an insistent, ferocious wrinkle, from a mouth mute in the face of offence; it even sometimes curls up close to pearls of sweat immodestly breaking out on skin, or in grey locks of hair and the too-bright red of lips closed tight on their dereliction. This is why even a face contorted by affront or terror remains indubitably a face. Behind its physical appearance – beautiful, ugly, seductive, repulsive – lies another face for those who care to look, who perceive that anxiety specific to the human being. A face says what it means, at once humble and great because it speaks in its always unique way, irreducible from its belonging to a community, family or clan, from that anxiety as old as mankind. It seeks, unconsciously obviously, to share this with those willing to stop a moment, to stop seeing the world through greedy, indifferent eyes. Thus it makes itself understood to the photographer as long as it is true that, faced with faces, the separation of the senses, of sight and smell, is always irrelevant. It seems at any rate that Didier Ben Loulou perceives each of them in function of how closely he is listening to the singular anxiety that haunts and assails him. His own project as a photographer and this ‘call of the face’ put each other to the test within this chiasmus, a chiasmus within which one will never know who has the initiative, whose threads one knows it would be vain to seek to unravel. The encounter of an attentive eye on the one hand, enabled no doubt by an uncomplacent consent to its own, human wounds, with the perceptible destitution of the face on the other, a face always exposed to the ravages of hatred which, inexplicably, appears in Jerusalem to be even more inexpiable than elsewhere, does not permit any clear demarcation line between one and the other.

But is there not, then, for that same reason, the announcement of a brief brotherly truce in the absurdity and implacable power of misfortune? Isn’t the photographer promising this (without necessarily knowing it) to those who look at that face? Isn’t that what they secretly expect from it? Especially those faces bearing the most intensely lasting trace of having had to confront, day after day, indifference, rejection, sorrow and anger, and which, under the effect of a harshness experienced as an irremissible fate, have had to resign themselves to forgetting their sorrow at receiving so little tenderness; and those whose wrinkles have been etched deeper by ancient torments, by outrages suffered, by long periods of wakefulness imposed on them and by moments of grace increasingly shortened by work and grief. Despite all this, even if they tell us the opposite, are not all these faces still a tiny bit available, ready to bathe in a few brief, unlikely moments of tenderness and fraternity or, even less likely, of wary love?

Although almost all these faces of Jerusalem commune in an unsharable pain, a sometimes hardly perceptible shiver from the depths of their interiority still prompts them to put in a token appearance, to make a token appeal. Either scared or unable to admit it to themselves, without pathos or bravado, they seem to be waiting, some of them for a very long time, for a highly unlikely encounter, a meeting with eyes which, because they would alight on a body tired of being burdened by an austere rancour for life or over-familiarity with solitude, would at last respond to their silent call before it is too late in the day, and above all if it is already late. Eyes which, because they are announcing that their life counts for someone, turn away from the harrowing, obsessive, morbid fears lying in wait for them and to which they certainly sometimes abandon themselves. It would give them or give them back the taste to come and take their place amongst the living again, a unique and insubstantial place, for a short and desirable time. But the singular enigma which haunts them, which a fleeting glint in the eyes, the torment of suddenly too tight lips or the slight rebellion of a gesture do not unveil, will remain for all that, since it is certainly an enigma for them too. That enigma will remain however close the photographer brings his camera to their fragile wounded flesh, to the point of seeming to want to touch their skin, caress their wrinkles, feel the locks of their hair or breath, almost obsessively, with them. It stubbornly resists photographic seizure, eludes his technical prowess, remains forever just out of reach of what his thoughtful and brotherly eyes perceive. Even when he photographs the most ephemeral, a sudden sparkle in the eyes or a very timid attempt at a smile, no matter what he does, he remains on the threshold of that enigma. The secret of the face remains inviolate, unattainable, even if it too is sadly submitted to the peril of being assaulted and murdered.

But it is beautiful, good and just that this secret persists because if this were not so these faces would in fact no longer be faces. If they were stripped of that secret intimacy, first of all with oneself, thanks to which we all breathe, live, desire, love, they would disappear. An intimacy that a certain delusion of transparency of all to all, a frenzied thirst for mastery, even extreme immodesty do not want to understand and confuse with a resistance to be overcome by all possible means. The photographer on the other hand stops at its threshold no doubt because he senses that this inviolable secret which calls him and obliges him to stand still to look at a face has the dimension of the infinite.

These faces snatched from a proud and intransigent existence, their defenceless nudity stripped to the quick, a nakedness already exposed to the great wind of unpredictable and possibly fatal violence, have universally human traits. However, since Didier Ben Loulou insists on the fact that he encountered them in the old city, it is advisable to ask oneself, to conclude, how this precision sheds light on his work, since he also flatly refuses to make it an alibi for an ethnological or even partisan standpoint.

Yet although nothing in these images indicates Jerusalem, the photographer’s concern with never showing a face in its entirety strikes us as conclusive evidence of their provenance. The Biblical and Koranic forbidding of representation which, since time immemorial, has dampened the audacity of painters, sculptors and photographers, restrained them from giving in to the temptation to take possession of the invisible, to force it into the visible, to render it available to men, takes on here, thanks to this concern, its noblest meaning. The link between that warning and the condemnation of idolatry (the desire to appropriate the invisible by means of an image or idea) is meditated on at length by the sages of the Talmud. But, far from condemning outright the gesture which seeks to represent it, they consider that ‘all faces are permitted, except the face of man’ (Talmud Babli: Rosh Hashanna 24b) – which is not tantamount to a religious curse on portraits since, despite this, they remain entirely permissible as long as they have no relief and, above all, no pretensions of completeness.

Whether he has heeded this warning or not, the faces Didier Ben Loulou photographs convey the profound meaning of this interdiction, whose aim is neither to stunt an artist’s emotions and work or render his eulogy of creative life impious but to incite him to not approach the beckoning shores of idolatry and death. Completeness always risks dumbfounding life, casting a spell of shadows and death on those who, satisfied or sated by what they see or know, or saturated with the entrancingly visible, soon shut out all desire. On the contrary, by opting for the fragment, by often accompanying his faces with a thin, decisive layer of shadow, Didier Ben Loulou comes down on the side of life, even when bringing us face to face with suffering and misery. That absence of completeness, that shadow which remains, do they not go hand in hand with a quest, not necessarily explicit to itself, for that invisible light which enables one to see the visible without showing oneself? This question does not stem from a will to measure a photographer’s work against a metaphysical hypothesis, but from the emotions these photographs arouse. Even when this face-to-face he forces upon us imposes confrontation with great loneliness, with its sweat and anxiety, with its ardent effort to not (at least not yet) go under, it seems that all that – that long distress, this moment of precarious clarity – comes towards us, now still, against the background of that invisible light. But that light is not to be sought in some distant elsewhere, or even in the next world, it is there in the most secret recesses of the artist’s eye.

A terrible opprobrium has hung over all human activities, including art and philosophy since the last century, since the invention of mass destruction and the relentlessness to eradicate all trace of humanity from faces. By depriving men, women and children of their name, by stripping them naked and beating them, by shaving off their hair, by hacking their bodies with machetes before disposing of them like some useless, harmful thing, assassins have left behind them a heritage of death on all continents. And through his work on the human face, with not the slightest naivety but, on the contrary, the utmost awareness of the power of evil, Didier Ben Loulou is resolutely opposing this heritage. Along with other artists and philosophers who know how darkness can engulf us with the utmost rapidity, without almost anyone being able to prevent it, he is obeying an injunction to live. And in this sense, his photographs give us a glimpse of the uncertain and fragile dawn of an atonement.