Zara Samiry believes documentary photography should not reduce people to symbols or spectacle. Her photographs rarely provide immediate answers; instead, they invite viewers to slow down, look closely, and encounter the complexity of human experience.

Zara Samiry is a Moroccan photographer and writer working between France and Morocco. Her practice combines documentary photography, portraiture and autobiographical storytelling to explore identity, gender, memory and cultural transmission.

Born in Casablanca, she first studied advertising and communication before graduating from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design d’Orléans with a DNSAP in 2010. She later studied Modern Literature at Sorbonne University, an experience that deepened the relationship between photography and writing in her work. 

Her long-term projects are rooted in North African realities and often focus on lives and histories that remain insufficiently represented. In My Taboo Child, she documented unmarried mothers confronting social stigma in Morocco. In Tales of Moroccan Amazons, begun in 2014, she followed one of Morocco’s pioneering female Tbourida troupes, examining equestrian tradition through transmission, collective discipline, intimacy and change. Her ongoing project, The Taste of Medlars: The Inner Exile, turns toward her own experience, exploring memory, belonging and the distance between one’s inner life and the world outside. 

Samiry’s work moves between observed reality and subjective experience, using photography not simply to describe a subject, but to question how stories are remembered, represented and passed on. Her projects have been supported by institutions including the Magnum Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and World Press Photo, and have been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including the International Center of Photography in New York, Photoquai in Paris, LagosPhoto, Photo Kathmandu and the Dubai Photo Exhibition.