Photographer & Filmmaker Portfolio
Medhat Soody
Project Overview
Medhat Soody is a photographer, visual artist and director of photography, born in Cairo and based in Paris. His work moves between dance and stage photography, black-and-white street photography, portraiture and documentary cinematography, and has been shown in solo exhibitions in France and Egypt.
Appstruct designed and built his portfolio: a dark, print-led website that presents five collections of work, his exhibitions and his film credits in English and French, and invites visitors to step into one of his series themselves.
Visit the live siteThe Site in Motion
A scroll through the home page: hero, featured stories, exhibitions, the darkroom, services and the Screen Test.
Open in a new tabPortfolio & shoots
Five collections — Street, Stage & Dance, Body & Fine Art, Portrait and Video Art — each opening onto individual shoots with their year, place and number of frames. Strips can be dragged, a frame expands into its shoot page, and a lightbox shows every photo at full size.
The Concept
Rather than a generic gallery, the site borrows the language of analogue photography:
A roll of film
Each collection is laid out as a 35mm contact strip, with sprocket holes and edge printing that reads MEDHAT SOODY 400TX. Every photograph is a numbered frame, and every shoot carries a contact-sheet code such as 01A or 03A.
Halftone prints
Key images are rendered as halftone prints in WebGL, so they read as printed matter rather than thumbnails. Each effect falls back to the plain photograph wherever WebGL is unavailable.
A darkroom mood
Dark by default with a light mode, a fine film grain behind every page, and a single gold accent kept for frame codes and edge printing.
Print it yourself
Screen Test
An interactive section where visitors switch on their camera and become a frame from Medhat's Fragile series, seen through a veil of bubble wrap rendered in WebGL. It runs entirely on the visitor's device: nothing is uploaded or saved, and the camera switches off the moment they stop or leave the page.
The site, page by page
A record of his solo exhibitions across France and the MENA region, and of his work as director of photography and camera operator on documentary films and live shows.
The halftone hero, his name, and two ways in: the portfolio, or a word with him.
Mobile Experience
The concept carries through to the phone: the halftone hero, the collection index and each shoot page are laid out for browsing with one hand, and the photo viewer closes with a swipe.
Bilingual by address
Every page exists in English and in French at its own address, both prerendered so search engines and link previews receive the complete page. Visitors are sent to their language automatically; crawlers are never redirected.
Under the Hood
A static, prerendered site, with the motion concentrated where it earns its place:
- —React 19 and TypeScript on Vite, styled with Tailwind CSS.
- —Motion with GSAP and Framer Motion, smooth scrolling with Lenis, and WebGL effects built on ogl — each with a plain-image fallback.
- —Every page prerendered at build time in both languages, with its own titles, descriptions, share images and structured data.
- —A Vercel middleware that routes visitors to English or French by their saved choice or their browser language.
- —An image pipeline that generates optimised photos from the original masters, and self-hosted, subsetted fonts.
Every frame tells a story.
What Medhat Has Now
One place for his photography, video art, exhibitions and film credits.
A site in English and French, for audiences in France and across the MENA region.
An interactive Screen Test that invites visitors into his Fragile series, on their own device.
Live at medhatsoody.art.
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