Giulia Frigieri

C'est Haram

C’est Haram is a photographic journey unfolding the reasons behind the annihilation of the ancient Berber tradition of facial tattooing. C’est Haram ( Haram is the Arabic word used by Muslims to express the idea of committing an act of sin against God ) is the answer that most of those women gave me when I asked them why was this tradition slowly vanishing and why young generation were denying and rejecting such cultural practice. Those women photographed, expressing different feelings towards their tattoos, are some of the last representatives of this tradition which is soon to be forgotten. My project seeks to understand and represents visually this shift in meaning, the reasons why this traditional tattoo has now become a shameful mark, a stigma, in conflict with the leading Arabic culture and the generational gap in perceiving the tattoo as a distinctive symbol of ethnic and cultural identity of a community.

Giulia Frigieri

Giulia Frigieri is a young Italian based young photojournalist and documentary photographer, focusing on themes such as Identity, female empowerment and inter-generational relationships in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Moving away from home at the age of 19, Giulia moved to London where she lived for over six years, graduating in Anthropology and Media at Goldsmiths University. Since then, a lot happened and everything changed. Her passion for portraits and storytelling blossomed alongside her anthropological studies and after a nomadic two years on a house boat on the canals of London and a bunch of internships in the British creative industry, Giulia took off to several global adventures that took her to live in Morocco for some time and to study storytelling and photojournalism at the acclaimed Danish School of Media and Journalism, in Aarhus, Denmark. Giulia published her first story “SURFING IRAN”, a reportage on the newborn Iranian surfing scene lead by a group of women on several magazines such as D la Repubblica (Italy), De Volkskrant (Netherlands), Vogue Arabia (Middle East) and Huck Magazine(UK). She’s now working on several projects around North Africa and in the Middle East.