Interview with Agata Benhacoun

Agata Benhacoun is Paris-based photographer. She holds a degree in philosophy and sociology. She studied photography at the Association of Polish Art Photographers in Warsaw. Over the past ten years, she has worked as a professional freelance documentary photographer.
Her work has been published in polish daily newspapers, Business Traveller, and Vogue Italia, and exhibited in contemporary art gallery in Poland (Państwowa Galeria Sztuki), the Glasgow Gallery of Photography, Fülle Galleria in Buenos Aires, during Canvas International Art Fair in Venice and in an exposition in Mexico City.
She was awarded first prize in the prestigious Masters of Photography Award, organized by Poland’s largest daily newspaper, which recognizes emerging talents in documentary photography.
She currently lives in Paris, where she continues to work on her photography projects. Her work explores themes of solitude, memory, and the invisible tensions in everyday life. She works primarily with black-and-white photography, combining street scenes with symbolic compositions.

Statement “Promised Land”

“Promised Land” is a photographic meditation on the dissonance between myth and daily life. Shot in Jerusalem, the series traces the fragile moments of tenderness, confusion, and routine that unfold against a backdrop of sacred narratives and unresolved tensions.

Through the eyes of children and the silence of streets, I look at a land that carries too many promises — and too little peace.

These photographs are not about religion or politics. They are about the human presence that remains in the cracks of history, trying to live, to play, to belong.

The ‘promise’ in this land feels distant, suspended — yet its weight is visible in every ordinary gesture.

How and when did you become interested in photography?

The search for a way to express my artistic preferences began early in my life. Since childhood, I had been looking for an activity that would allow me to express myself. Everything became easier in 2007, when I first used a camera to experiment. Photography quickly became my passion, and a few years later, it became a profession that fully aligns with who I am.

Is there any artist/photographer who inspired your art?

I find lasting inspiration in the work of William Klein, Sebastião Salgado, and Sally Mann.

Klein’s use of close, often confrontational framing and his raw, expressive energy taught me to embrace visual intensity and emotional risk. His images don’t observe — they collide. That sense of nearness, even chaos, helped shape my approach to photographing people and public spaces where intimacy and tension coexist.

Salgado’s epic humanism, especially in vulnerable environments, moved me to believe that beauty can carry weight without softening the truth.

And Sally Mann’s radical intimacy — her lens on what is fragile, private, and uncomfortable — gave me permission to photograph silence, pain, and tenderness without apology.

Why do you work in black and white rather than colour?

Black and white lets me strip the image down to its emotional bones. Without the distraction of colour, I can focus on gesture, light, absence, and the tension of presence. It gives me a visual distance that brings me emotionally closer. The limitations become a deeper honesty.

How much preparation do you put into taking a photograph/series of photographs?

My process is mostly intuitive. I rarely plan in detail — I move through spaces slowly, allowing something unseen to call me closer. I watch light, gestures, silences. Often I return to a place more than once, but not to capture something specific — rather to understand its rhythm.

While working in Jerusalem, I followed this rhythm instinctively — letting the tension of the city, the absence, the rituals, speak before I did.

Photographing, for me, is not about chasing a moment. It’s about being quiet enough to notice when the moment comes to me.

Where is your photography going? What projects would you like to accomplish?

I continue to explore street photography not as a social spectacle, but as a form of inner listening. I’m drawn to moments of solitude — often hidden within noise and movement — where a human presence quietly slips out of sync with the world around it.
What interests me most is not the crowd, but the pause inside it. I want to keep documenting these subtle dissonances — the gaps between appearance and truth, between ritual and meaning.

In the long term, I aim to deepen this work into a larger visual essay about disconnection, exile, and the silent rituals people create to survive themselves.

Website: https://agatabenhacoun.com/