Moroccan photographer and writer working between France and Morocco.
Leica Oskar Barnack Award nominee, 2025.
Zara Samiry develops long-term photographic narratives at the intersection of documentary practice, portraiture and autobiographical storytelling. Her work explores identity, gender, memory and cultural transmission, with particular attention to lives and histories that remain insufficiently represented.
Her projects have received support from the Magnum Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and World Press Photo.
Her photographs have been presented internationally at major institutions and festivals, including the International Center of Photography in New York, Photoquai in Paris, Vivre! Photographies de la résilience presented by the Fondation Dapper in Gorée, LagosPhoto, Photo Kathmandu and the Dubai Photo Exhibition.
Her photographs have also been published in The New York Times, CNN, Financial Times, Télérama, GQ, Marie Claire, Frankie Magazine, Zenith Magazine and N by Norwegian.
Born in Casablanca, Samiry first studied advertising and communication before graduating from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design d’Orléans with a DNSAP in 2010. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Literature from Sorbonne University. This dual background in visual art and literature has shaped a practice in which photography and writing continually inform one another.
Her projects are rooted in North African realities while addressing broader questions of belonging, social visibility and the ways personal and collective histories are transmitted.
In My Taboo Child, she documented unmarried mothers confronting stigma and social exclusion in Morocco. Rather than reducing them to symbols of victimhood, the series approaches their experiences through intimacy, dignity and individual presence.
In Tales of Moroccan Amazons, begun in 2014, she followed one of Morocco’s pioneering female tbourida troupes. Moving between collective performance and quieter moments of preparation, the project examines how women inhabit and transform an equestrian tradition historically associated with masculine power.
Her ongoing project, The Taste of Medlars: The Inner Exile, turns toward her own experience. Through fragments of memory, everyday observation and the sensory trace of childhood, the work explores exile as an intimate condition: the distance that can exist between a person, a place and the possibility of belonging.
Across these projects, Samiry approaches documentary photography as a space of encounter rather than explanation. She does not use the camera to provide immediate answers or turn people into symbols. Her photographs invite viewers to slow down, look closely and remain with the complexity of another person’s experience.
For Samiry, photography is not simply a way of describing the visible. It is a means of bringing overlooked stories into view and questioning how they are remembered, represented and passed on.
Selected recognition
Leica Oskar Barnack Award nominee, 2025
Projects supported by the Magnum Foundation, Prince Claus Fund, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and World Press Photo
Exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Photoquai, Fondation Dapper, LagosPhoto, Photo Kathmandu and the Dubai Photo Exhibition
Published in The New York Times, CNN, Financial Times, Télérama, GQ, Marie Claire, Frankie Magazine, Zenith Magazine and N by Norwegian
Speaker at TEDxEHTP
