



1 / 8 Chevron Chevron From “Inner Constellations: Photographs by Maïmouna Guerresi” Malik, 2010 (Senegal).

The bodies of the people Maïmouna Guerresi photographs—usually friends and family, shot against a wall outside her house in Dakar, Senegal—seem to extend beyond their physical boundaries. Her subjects are shot in costumes that Guerresi constructs herself, often using textiles collected from her travels in Africa and Asia. The outfits are sculptural, almost architectural, creations that fuse the face and limbs of the subject with the space and air around them. Some figures appear to levitate; others seem bodiless, their cloaks encompassing an empty expanse with their heads floating above. The photos are dense with religious allusions, often mixed and melded: a woman’s long, draping robes could be a Muslim head scarf or the veil of a Renaissance Madonna; towering headdresses mimic Islamic minarets, connecting the ground and the sky; a streak of paint running from forehead to chin evokes pre-Islamic native traditions.

Guerresi was born in Italy, in 1951, as Patrizia Guerresi, to a religious Catholic family. She adopted a new name when she married a Senegalese man and converted to Sufi Islam, in 1991. The mysticism of Sufism suffuses her work. These photographs—which are collected in a new book, “Inner Constellations”—convey a feeling that is simultaneously disconcerting and serene. They are portraits that capture not individual personalities but the conjunction of the individual with something greater. In an interview with the Web site Muslima, Guerresi said, “My moods are expressed in my work as faces, color, and emotions, where the body is no longer a prison of the soul, but rather like a temple to house and augment the Divine.”

“Inner Constellations: Maïmouna Guerresi Photographs” is out this month from Glitterati Incorporated.