Tarek El Kassouf
She is cold elegance, lonesome beauty, coursing with inaccessible sensuality. Contempt radiates from her, not as malice but as armour—her defence against a world that has intruded too far. Dog-like, he presses forward, desperate to impress, oblivious to the boundaries he’s crossed. Her personal space, her pain, perfectly concealed behind flawlessness, is now violated.
She may be naked, but she wears an invisible armour, impenetrable but for the cracks in her gaze. Her eyes pierce him: “Run away, little boy.”

The pleasurer is ravenous, gluttonous for her. She lies delicate, disclothed, disclosed—but emotionally veiled, blurred, obscured. His touch, at first a gentle exploration, becomes a cartography of desire. Sexual reconnaissance, tracing the lines of her body, seeking an ecstatic harbour. He enters her.

Heart quakes. Blood surges. Breathing turns to heaving. Receiving. Their bodies weaving. Muscles contracting, involuntarily, rhythmically. A transient peak, an altered state of consciousness. A shared cognisance. This is the essence of being human: euphoric, intoxicated, floating outside of time.

But moments are merciless. Tumbling into tumult, they separate after the tension by the pool. And she knows she is the betrayer. She has fallen into the black hole of self-sabotage, of destruction, of justified infidelity.
Now she is upside down, spiralling into devastation. The knife she’s wielded—crafted by insecurity, tempered by loneliness, forged from the pain she hides behind her perfection—has pierced the heart of the only love that mattered. Over and over, again and again, the wounds multiply.
Her wound wounds him. And as he bleeds, she falls deeper. Numbness overtakes her. Numbness and flesh. Anything to stop feeling. Anything to come again. Anything to forget that the loneliness is consuming her whole.

From between his legs, the truth is clear: she has destroyed the very thing she craves. She has lost herself. It is done. He has taken everything.
No matter what she does, she can’t return to the person she was before. She has been undone, consumed by the connection she both sought and betrayed. She longs for the most beautiful death—one wrapped in love, tenderness, understanding.

Instead, she falls into the abyss of this opposite.



Credits
  • Client: Tarek El Kassouf
  • Agency: Karima Asaad
  • Production: Karima Asaad
  • Role: Photographer, Director, Creative Director, Production