Achraf Baznani (born 1 January 1979) is a Moroccan artist, filmmaker and photographer.[1] He was born in Marrakesh.[2][3]
Baznani got started in photography by chance. He received a Kodak Ektra Compact 250 camera for his birthday as a teen.[2] Baznani is self-taught and has never taken photography classes.[4] He has made several short films and documentaries. These include "Walk" in 2006 and "The Forgotten" in 2007. "The Immigrant" in 2007 received several national and international awards.[5]
Baznani is best known for being the first artist in the Arab world to publish a photo-book based on surreal imagery.[6] Both books, Through My Lens and Inside My dreams, are surreal.[7] Baznani places himself within his photographs of everyday objects, scenes and amusing situations.[8]
His works were featured in various magazines worldwide like PicsArt, National Geographic,[1] Mambo, Photo+, Amateur Photographer, Fotografe Melhor,[9] Digital Photo magazine.
During 2014, he completed his "52 Project Archived 2016-05-14 at the Wayback Machine", a personal mission which he committed to taking a picture every week in a row for a year.
On April 29th, 2015, Joel Robinson, a Canadian photographer, accused Achraf Baznani of plagiarism. His evidence was a long article, published both on his website and petapixel.com, that the Moroccan photographer used his work in a way that amounted to plagiarism.[10][11]
Although Robinson did not mention Baznani by name, the nature of the case was said by Robinson to be as follows. Robinson's originals all had a photo of himself in the middle of a graphic design of some kind. In each case, Baznani removed Robinson's image and replaced it with one of himself.[12]
Achraf Baznani has won these awards: