Lebanese Fashion Photographer Tareck Raffoul Looks for Stories Beyond

The way of life photographer’s creativity is rooted in foundational filmmaking.

Lebanese trend and wonder photographer Tareck Raffoul appears for the eyes in {a photograph} earlier than turning his consideration to the outfit, the set, or the color palette. For him, that’s the place a picture both connects or falls flat.“That’s the important part,” Raffoul tells SceneStyled. “When you see an image, your eye goes directly to the eyes first.”

That intuition comes from a background far faraway from the units he now curates and captures for manufacturers like L’Oréal, Gucci, Chanel, Nivea and YSL.

Before taking pictures campaigns and editorial work, Raffoul studied filmmaking, focusing closely on documentary storytelling — a observe rooted in observing individuals and the realities round them.

“I like documentary because it tells the stories of people,” he explains. “It’s more real, it’s more authentic. I was always driven by social topics… related to people and their stories.”Photography and cinema had been a part of his life lengthy earlier than that. Growing up, visible storytelling was already shaping how he understood his environment.

“This world affected me from my early years as a teenager,” he says. “I find it a way to express myself — my thoughts, how I see things, how I experience them.”

Documentary turned his formal focus, however images regularly started pulling him in one other route. What began as private experimentation — usually taking pictures trend and wonder pictures on the facet — finally shifted the course of his profession.

The transition didn’t imply leaving his documentary instincts behind. Instead, Raffoul discovered a strategy to merge the 2 disciplines.“From documentary, it’s the stories,” he explains. “From fashion, it’s the concept — how I frame it, how I light it, how every prop is curated. It’s staged, but behind it there is the story of someone.”

That steadiness between narrative and visible building seems most clearly in his private initiatives. One of his latest exhibitions started throughout a interval when sleep felt unimaginable.

“I was going through a phase where I couldn’t sleep because of my thoughts,” he says. Curious whether or not others skilled the identical, Raffoul turned to his viewers, asking individuals on Instagram what ideas hold them awake at evening.The responses shortly crammed his inbox. Each message turned the muse for a picture, later forming the idea of an exhibition.

Across the collection, personal anxieties and late-night reflections had been translated into fastidiously staged images — a means of documenting emotion by a trend lens.

Even when the photographs are constructed, the emotional core stays central. Raffoul builds his lighting and framing across the identical intuition he developed in documentary work: the seek for feeling in an individual’s gaze.

Light performs a key position in that course of. Raffoul research the way it falls throughout the face, the way it displays within the eyes, and the way delicate shadows can shift the temper of a picture.“Everything inspires me — colors, paintings, light,” he says. “I love the sunlight and how it creates shadows on the face, on the body, on anything. Even a glass on a table — the way light filters through it and creates reflections inspires me.”

But technical precision alone, he believes, isn’t what makes a picture resonate.

“There are a lot of good photographers today,” Raffoul says. “But the most important thing is the person and their story — their background, and what they want to say through their images.”

Even throughout the polished world of trend images, Raffoul approaches each body the identical means he approached documentary: by in search of the human story behind it.