PHOTOGRAPHER AND DIRECTOR OUMAYMA B. TANFOUS
Photography · Medium Format · Personal Vision — Antakly Projects
Oumayma B.
The photographer who secretly still wants to be a painter. On frames, film, and finding yourself in the work.
PHOTO ESSAY · FASHION EDITORIAL
NINUNINA.COM
She grew up in Tunisia in the nineties. At four years old she wanted to paint. She still does — secretly. In the years between that early instinct and now, she's built a practice around the photograph: medium format film, slow observation, fashion editorials that pull from cinema and canvas alike. Oumayma B. makes images that feel considered, even when they're fast. We talked about the long game.
Technology is moving fast. AI-generated images, new tools, new anxieties. What does that friction feel like from where you're working?
I've been shooting medium format for five years. There's something almost stubborn about that — a deliberate slowness in a moment where everything is accelerating. Now I'm moving back toward digital, and toward mixed media for my personal projects. The transition is interesting to be inside.
What does image-making mean when the image can be generated? What does authorship look like? I'm genuinely curious, not defensive. But the questions are real.
Walk us through how you actually work. From first thought to finished frame.
It depends entirely on what I'm making. A fashion editorial and a photo essay operate on completely different timelines and emotional registers.
For editorials — movies, paintings, whatever's alive in my head at the time. The inspiration arrives, the production follows quickly. You're working in a compressed space, building something precise and immediate.
Photo essays are different. Slower. More interior. I'm documenting a state of mind, a community, a place. That requires observation over time, research, a lot of sitting with the material before touching a camera. Some of those projects take years to feel finished.
The gap between those two ways of working is actually something I find generative. They train different muscles. One teaches you to move. The other teaches you to wait.
One teaches you to move. The other teaches you to wait.— Oumayma B. on the two modes of making
What's coming?
My first book. Two years in the making.
Follow developments at ninunina.com
A book is a different kind of commitment than any single image or series. It has weight. It has sequence. It asks you to stand behind something completely.
What does well-being actually look like for you — not the romanticised version, the real one?
I had to unlearn something in my twenties. There's a story mainstream culture tells about artists — that the suffering is the source, that you need to be broken to make something true. I stopped believing that.
Balance is not the enemy of the work. Balance is how the work gets better. Taking care of my mental health, staying present to myself — that's what creates the space where something real can happen. The struggle narrative is a trap. I'm not interested in it.
& Time — the long game
Courtesy of the Artist