I was born in Beirut in 1974; the war at the time forced my family to escape when I was nine years old. Together with my parents I fled to London, which is where I grew up and studied.

I come from a family of artists, poets and writers. It was clear to me from an early age that I wanted to follow this path and pursue the arts, which lead me to studying at Art College. It was here that I started experimenting with photography and playing with different effects in the dark room.

Trying to combine art and money I went into advertising, working in London and later in Dubai where I worked for large international advertising agencies. It is here that I started taking photos commercially for various magazines in the Gulf and Middle East. I would go off every weekend to a different area in the United Arab Emirates and photograph people and places. My style of photography has always been reportage.

Life in the rat race finally got to me, which is when I decided to pack up my life in Dubai and travel around the world solo, me alone with myself and my cameras. My favourite compact camera at the time of traveling was my Olympus mju II, to be honest I had two, one in silver and one in black. I had at this point not yet switched to digital.
I shot everything on slide film.

The places I traveled to and explored are Cuba, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Easter Island, French Polynesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa and Mozambique. Hundreds of my pictures were taken during that time.

Currently I live and work in Berlin, Germany and have finally switched to digital, after a lot of research I made my choice, I got the Olympus C8080. My research paid off and without this camera I would not have been able to make my current book project “emotions in motion”, coming out in spring.

The scenes I hunt today are credible pictures of street life, the way it happens out there every day, in our neighbourhood. With the extremely compact E-400 I’m able to go for highest image quality in an uncompromisingly mobile D-SLR camera.

www.touficbeyhum.com