acertainblindness
snowfall
defaced | tombstone photograph, jewish cemetery, fes
no to abuse. let the kidnapped ‘brek az adin’ go.
these four images were all taken at the february 20, 2011 fes protest organised by the moroccan feb20th movement. for reasons apparent to me at the protest, i decided to withhold these photos until i had departed morocco. as hinted in a post long ago, my decision to be cautious was retrospectively confirmed.
not that i believe myself (or any of my images) to be of any great interest or importance, nor under any protracted surveillance. but i do need to be street smart, and the protest was my first serious encounter with the muscular morphologies of violence that states exert. let me be clear, the protest was entirely peaceful.
i have much respect for those citizens who assert their rights (granted, tolerated or otherwise) for their voices to be heard. for imagining otherwisenesses and claiming them as their own. because i enjoy the privilege of being geographically mobile, having a foreign passport and possess the additional benefit of being male - i calculate that the risk which i run is deportation. i assume, without knowing, that most of the citizens who protested, and continue to do so, do not enjoy the same matrix of privileges as i do. and there are risks that run far higher than deportation.
i have no political stance on moroccan politics per se. these are, in my mind, issues for moroccans and the moroccan diaspora to work out. during my time here, i have encountered a very broad range of opinions - from unquestioning support of the status quo through demands for tinkering at the edges through full blown demands for revolution and uprising. politics is everywhere and yet, in a strong sense, nowhere at all.
i am now elsewhere. there will, of course, be the odd archival excursion. who knows, perhaps even a future return to morocco itself. i do not want to leave an aftertaste that my experiences here have been solely political, or threatening, or menacing. or that i have ever feared for myself. indeed, quite the contrary.
i was once challenged, quite rightly, by a moroccan woman who wanted to know why i was so interested in photographing protests. i figured it like this. every regime has sets of rules and conventions which dictate how we interact, how we are perceived and how we think about ourselves. gender is a regime, politics is a regime, economics is a regime. and yet, despite the regimes presenting themselves as natural, unchanging and ideal, there are always people testing the boundaries of the possible. and it is exactly here, this witnessing of explorations of boundaries that so captivates my interest.
enough.
mutual support, alley way, old medinah fes
these wooden beams were installed a few years ago after the collapse of a number of buildings. initially as a temporary measure, these beams have become a permanent part of the built fabric in the medinah.
seafood bzef, agadir
this is the only time i have ever seen moroccans seriously hustling other moroccans for their custom. we arrived at the open air restaurants with some local friends and the car was swamped with people trying to entice the driver with offers of fish, fresh fish, fresh fish, fresh fish.
i was bewildered as to how one actually decides which restaurant to eat at, but our friends knew that stall #17 was delicious and cheap. and they were right, the fish was excellent.
