A PARISIAN with dark beguiling eyes and a reserved, if roguish countenance, Dahmane appears to have stepped from an advertising hoarding from the 1950s:
a lone figure lighting his last Gauloises beneath a gas lamp; or the leading man on a movie poster from a film by Claude Chabrol.
In the same spirit of nouvelle vague, Dahmane usually shoots in black and white and captures Chabrol's same sense of whimsy, crafting his images in shades and shadows to create a mood of expectation and extreme femininity. Dahmane rarely strips his subjects bare, and evokes a more intimate eroticism by leaving us to our imaginations. Likewise, he seldom chooses the ingénue, but brings us women at the height of sexual charisma and sophistication, the worldly wise femme fatale who possesses the camera as if it is she, not the photographer, who directs each shot.
We find Dahmane's subjects juxtaposed amongst old and rusting machinery, on street corners, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, a glimpse of bare buttocks, legs in black suspenders crossed at the thighs, breasts dappled by morning light, their bodies shaped as sculptures against bleak grey landscapes. The result arrests the eye and makes you look again more closely, the eroticism slow more than immediate, something that grows and reaches your senses on a deeper, more personal level.
Each set up in this dense, beautifully produced book is so meticulously staged, it has the quality of appearing impulsive, like an impromptu party, and reminds me of a Chabrol scene of a woman dragging her coat behind her as she leaves a night club, the watery sun lifting above the Paris rooftops. 'In essence,' says Dahmane, 'I want to capture life's spontaneity in my photographs, as well as in everything else.' He does so.
Dahmane – Erotic Sessions
Published by Edition Skylight, Zurich
ISBN 3-3766-491-6
www.edition-skylight.com
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