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[The photos and text presented here are the result of my work in five Amazigh (also known as Berber) communities or distinct architectural ensembles in the south of Morocco.]
My work in Morocco began in May 2002 when I was invited by a former high school friend of Moroccan descent to photograph his father`s native village, Timkatti. This place of mud and stone is located in the Ida Ou Tannane region about forty miles north of Agadir. Like most Westerners invited into a traditional community, I was overwhelmed by all that appeared exotic and as a photographer I was drawn to it. In no time I was snapping away at every mule, shepherd, palm tree or water-carrying girl I encountered. However, after the first couple of days the fascination for the exotic gave way to a deeper curiosity about the dynamics of the community and especially the strong sense of community belonging evident in these mountain people.
Upon my return home, and after processing my film, I was deeply dissatisfied with the results. They were shallow and didn`t reveal anything of what I had experienced and encountered. They merely gave a factual account of my trip. I realized that if I wanted to render visible something as abstract as, for instance, social organization I would have to acquire serious knowledge on an ethnographic level. I would have to understand the subtle dynamics of Amazigh society. My subjects would need to view my photographic approach as respectful and honest. My project would have to be properly structured and well-founded on a collaborative basis.
My experience in Morocco convinced me that social organization in Amazigh society has always been expressed through a collective creativity that shapes their habitat. Whether it concerns the tents of the semi-nomads of the Middle Atlas, a village in the High Atlas, or a ksar in the Dra Valley, the intimate relationship between the everyday surroundings and the human settlement is always a testimony to the refined social organization of Amazigh society. It is these testimonies that I am attempting to document in my project Assarag. The term assarag has a double usage in the southern Moroccan Amazigh language Tachelhit. It indicates the central place in the village where people meet for community events and it also refers to the core of the house where family life takes place. As such the word represents the two principle aspects of my work: the context and the social organization of Amazigh society in rural Morocco.
I am focusing strongly on habitat because I am convinced it is a fundamental statement of cultural identity, especially in rural communities such as the ones I am documenting. In this case the term “habitat” should be interpreted in the broadest sense. I am not only referring to houses and formal architecture, but also to functional and collective constructions such as irrigation canals, fields, terraces, pastures, shepherds’ shelters, olive presses, and so forth. In Amazigh communities building and living are integrated as collective activities. This implies an approach that assigns a preeminent role to the users, the inhabitants. What I’m trying to show is how the habitat emerges in dialogue with the geographical constraints, how habitat fulfills the cultural and social needs of a people, and how Imazighen manage the natural elements in extreme environments to make space habitable.
Given the social and geographical complexity of Morocco, I structured my project around a selection of seven rural Amazigh communities. Each one represents a distinct sociological, linguistic, and architectural entity. By immersing myself for several weeks at a time in each community, and by returning at different seasons for a longer period of time, I tried to understand and reveal each community’s identity. The purpose of this method is to illustrate the general contours of rural Amazigh culture via specific cases. Thorough research and reflection preceded the choice of the locations, and a balance is kept between the various regions from north to south and east to west. As a result these seven photographic case studies reflect the diversity of rural Amazigh culture and its habitats in Morocco.
In a society much less acquainted with cameras and images, being photographed is considered to be something special, even unique. In contrast to most urban people in Morocco and elsewhere most of my subjects have no, or very few, photos of themselves. Almost none have been portrayed by a professional photographer. An important element in this type of photography is the quest for an appropriate method to engage the subject. How can I photograph people in a realistic way? How can I achieve some sense of their authenticity? Some colleagues decide to take photos surreptitiously, literally to "take" photos in the sense of stealing them. Others hand over the control of the camera to the subject. They do this to exclude the intervention of the photographer, who is obviously culturally and personally biased. The reality, of course, is that the mere presence of a camera and a Westerner changes the behavior of people.
I opted for a compromise: for the execution of this work I decided to use a 4 x 5 inch field camera. This is a choice with far-reaching consequences. Firstly, it’s a large and heavy camera that has to be put on a tripod and manipulated beneath a black cloth. This means that the photographer has little space to move and that he is very visible. As a result, any improvisation is restricted to a minimum. Moreover, exposure with this type of camera is limited to a single shot, unlike the fast repetitive takes allowed by handheld cameras. This method makes it virtually impossible to secretly steal images. It appears paradoxical, but it is precisely the time-consuming process and the size of the camera that made me choose it. The installation of the equipment and the actual making of the picture become an almost ritual and collaborative enterprise. In this way the inherently aggressive action of the photographer is softened and considered much less as an intrusion upon one’s privacy. Also, the people I am portraying perceive this deliberate and time-consuming method as the appropriate way of being photographed; the formality of the event matches a certainly formality inherent in rural Amazigh society. The actual making of the photograph becomes a collaboration between my subject and me. For me it is fundamental to treat my subjects with humanity and to give a sense of what matters to them.
Despite all this, I am left with the limitations of the photographic image. A viewer would have to know something of Amazigh life to “get” what is going on in the pictures, to render the images legible. Textual context would have to be provided because although images have a profoundly direct, visceral impact, they remain frozen moments in time. Text is linear and provides context, both in substance and in time.
In 2007 I met anthropologist David Crawford in Marrakech and we agreed to join forces and do a book on Tagharghist, a High Atlas village where he undertook his PhD research in 1998-1999. This forthcoming book, Nostalgia for the Present, is grounded in a set of my pictures, but the ethnographic commentary accompanying the photos points readers to much they would miss in the frame; it establishes broader contexts and deepens the historical background that would be impossible to detect from the image alone. Nostalgia also provides a commentary on the relationship between images and text, and it explores the difficulty of presenting a “traditional” place in the midst of profound change. Both photography and ethnographic writing have been critiqued for tending towards static representations; both seem to portray people “in a moment” rather than in the complex state of becoming that most of us sense in our personal lives. Our objective in this book is to use text and image in productive tension with one another. The images convey the sensuous texture of the instant, but the text expands this, providing social, historical, and personal context that deepen the engagement with the photo. Nostalgia for the Present is due out in 2013 from Leiden University Press.
In the era of the “Arab Spring,” media coverage of the Islamic world has noticeably increased. From a time when it was seriously proposed by some experts that Muslims were “stuck in time,” Westerners now have a general anxiety about fluidity in the region, and especially about what new forms of Islamic modernity are likely to appear. These revolutionary developments are of obvious importance. However, there remains a serious lack of context for these changes, an inattention to the daily lives and struggles in the background, especially in rural areas. In other words, despite the widespread importance of challenges to the political status quo, Moroccans and others in the Muslim world do continue to spend most of their time making a living rather than making political statements, and the dynamics of the former are related to those of the latter. We intend to reveal something of the everyday side of Morocco, a dimension absent from conventional media accounts.
Apart from offering a survey of Amazigh culture in rural Morocco, I hope that this project will also serve as an instrument for reflection on the social and environmental consequences of habitat in general. Our planet is faced with a fundamental ecological and energy crisis. Within decades the end of the unbridled use of fossil fuels is expected. We have to anticipate the important cultural shift this will bring, and live up to the requirements of sustainable development. At present, building and living are responsible for the largest energy consumption next to transport and industry. This fact implies the need for a radical modification of our housing concepts. It means we have to re-design our houses so that they are less dependent on energy consumption, wasteful production techniques, and industrial materials such as concrete, steel and synthetic products. It involves a modern and post-industrial use of natural materials: wood of course, but also natural stone and earth. In other words, we will need to return to the same primary materials the Imazighen value and use so well. This photographic project hopes to contribute to a better appreciation of traditional building skills. All too often these are considered as primitive, although they have always satisfied the demands of what we define today as sustainable development.
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I would like to thank Dave Crawford for his careful reading of this article and the suggestions he made to improve it. Above all I’m deeply grateful to him for sharing so generously his profound knowledge with me and for helping me make the right decisions in my work.