There is another image of Tunisia — one being built slowly and deliberately by a generation of photographers who grew up inside it. They know its light — the particular white brightness of a Mediterranean afternoon, the way it falls on white-washed walls and salt flats and rooftops where children play because the streets below feel less safe. They know its contradictions: the warmth and the strictness, the beauty and the hardship, the pull of Europe and the weight of staying. They know what it feels like to be different there — to be creative, or simply someone who sees the world differently and has to find a way to survive that. They pour all of these feelings into their work, and the result is something deeply beautiful.

Bachir Tayachi grew up on the rooftops of Douar Hicher, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Tunis. Being different wasn't easy. "People were often shocked by the way I thought. From a young age, I was seen as different — the 'black sheep' in a way," he says. "But it definitely made me more resilient."

His path to photography was anything but linear: first theatre, then architecture, then a camera won at a drawing competition. That last thing changed everything. Today, his images sit somewhere between photography and painting — meticulously edited, emotionally charged, slightly elevated from reality. "What matters most to me is capturing the most beautiful version of a person, not just how they appear, but how I see them in that moment," he explains. His work has appeared in Vogue Arabia, and his immersive installation In My Room — built around the themes of self-acceptance, childhood, and healing — marked a new chapter in his practice.

Born and raised in Paris to a Tunisian family from Djerba, Bilal El Kadhi is self-taught in every sense of the word. His two short films — Life of Isaaq (2019) and Yonder (2022), both shot on the island — are, at first glance, love letters to Tunisian youth: kids running across salt flats, teenagers dancing on rooftops, summer and laughter and the particular light of a Mediterranean afternoon. Look closer, and something else comes through.

Underneath the beauty is a harder story. About the young men who see no future and attempt to cross the Mediterranean at night. About the ones who don't make it. El Kadhi holds both realities in the same frame without choosing between them — the joy is real, and so is the despair, and neither cancels the other out.

Bilal has worked with Nike, Vogue, Isabel Marant, and Dior, and his editorial and personal work has been covered by Dazed and WeTransfer's WePresent.

She left Tunisia at ten years old. Now, decades later, she is still making work about what it means to leave — and what it means to try to come back. Oumayma B. Tanfous grew up between Tunis and Montreal, built her career in New York, and shoots with medium format film in a way that feels slow and considered and deeply alive. Her portraits — of teenagers, of communities, of women existing on their own terms — have appeared in Vogue España, Dazed, Teen Vogue, and the New York Times, and her clients include Apple TV, Levi's, and Converse.

In 2025, she published her first photobook, Between I and Lands. It traces a return: twenty years after leaving Tunisia as a child, she went back to the places her family carried in their memory — Tunis, where she was born; Djerba, the land of her ancestors; Kerkennah, where she spent summers as a kid. What she found was the tension between the country that had lived in her dreams and the one that had kept changing without her. The book moves through landscapes and portraits of strangers, documenting longing and loss and the fragile, complicated thing that home turns out to be.

Jawher Ouni was born in Sidi Bouzid — the city most people know only as the starting point of the Arab Spring. He grew up on the coast, but the interior never left him. His father is a calligrapher and artist; art was always close by. Now based in France, he returns to Tunisia with his camera the way others return to a feeling.

In 2019, he spent a month in his ancestral village just outside Sidi Bouzid, photographing his family and the landscape. The images are simply composed and completely honest — wild cacti, white-washed walls, his cousin in a pink tracksuit standing perfectly still. Nothing voyeuristic, nothing reductive.

His work was published in the collaborative book The Same Moon Above Us: A Tunisian Tale and featured on WeTransfer's WePresent.