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Charif Benhelima’s photography explores themes of origin, identity, representation, and perception, often focusing on the feeling of being an outsider. His work reflects his personal background as the son of a Moroccan father and a Belgian mother. After his father’s deportation and his mother’s untimely death, Benhelima was placed in a children’s home and later fostered by various families in the rural countryside.

Benhelima’s work is organized into series. His first series, Welcome to Belgium, documents people on the margins of society: asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, homeless children, and an addicted mother in cities like Charleroi, Brussels, and Antwerp. These are classic black-and-white documentary photos shot in 35mm. Another series, Harlem on my mind: I was, I am, features Polaroid street views and portraits mainly from Harlem’s African-American community, whose experiences with racism and discrimination prompted Benhelima to confront his own identity.

Benhelima advanced his Polaroid experiments with his series Black-Out, where everyday objects like pigeons, basketballs, and rows of trees are heavily overexposed, yet still barely visible. In Roots, he applies the same technique to plants. Over the past 15 years, Polaroid 600 has become his main medium, known for its unique quality of being both sharp and blurry at the same time. This medium allows Benhelima to play a subtle pictorial game of revealing and concealing.