About

Djamal Benmokhtar (Algeria, 1968) is a French-Algerian independent documentary photographer based in Tenerife (Spain).

In 1973, the age of 5 years, in the middle of the Algerian dictatorship, Djamal was forced to escape his country due to the political persecution of his Muslim Algerian father and his French Catholic mother.

This event will mark all his photographic projects. From an early age, he picked up the camera that his father gave him, and he became obsessed with finding his personal identity and finding a place to call home.

In 1996, while Djamal was studying to become a pilot, he started his photographic project “Aviation,” documenting his own journey and the massive explosion of mass tourism in the 90´s and early 2000´s This photographic investigation makes him reflect on the idea of why people travel: for leisure or forced for political conflicts, poverty, or war.

This crucial event in our current History, between “the ones who have and the ones who have not,” was the starting point of his long-term project “Le Voyage,” in which Djamal, explores the consequences of the massive and forced migrative movements from Africa to Europe, due…

In 2021, Djamal Benmokhtar started this photographic journey to document the life of five individual African migrants from the moment that they arrived in the Canary Islands in Spain through their journey to survive and get the paperwork to become European citizens and able to support their families and communities back home.

In the same year, during the worldwide Covid pandemic, he published “Confined in the sky”, a photo reportage about the challenges of the aviation industry in the Spanish newspaper “El Mundo”,

In 2023, his personal project “Aviation Chronicles” was published in the French photo magazine Revue Epic.His body of work "Le voyage" was finalist in B/W Photogarphy awards LensCulture .