Visions of Morocco
A Flak Photo Essay

Originally built as fortified cities, with ramparts designed to repel attacks from invaders, the old medinas of Marrakech and Taroudannt are an inviting labyrinth of winding passageways. The people of Morocco are similarly intriguing. While most are devoutly Muslim, there is a level of openness and tolerance indicative of a culture shaped by 3,000 years of African, European, Moorish, Arabic and Berber influences.

Muslim tendencies are inward, so Moroccan culture presents considerable challenges to traditional street photography, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Muslims go to great lengths to stratify inward and outward experience. Women cover their bodies and hair for everyone but their husbands. Houses are devoid of outside ornament. There is a general suspicion of photographic images and it is considered a great affront to photograph someone without first gaining their permission (a formidable task when you don't speak Arabic). In practice, I found the people welcoming, quick to smile and prone to invite a foreigner into their home for a cup of mint tea.

The most familiar images of the country hearken back to Michael Curtiz's classic 1941 film Casablanca. Shot in a week on studio backlots in Burbank, none of it was filmed on location. But I watched the film again before my visit to the actual Casablanca. After experiencing both, I have concluded that the picture's most apparent distortion wasn't its fez-wearing caricatures, but the visual limitation of its black and white imagery. The real Morocco is a pageant of vivid luminosity. The landscape is an appropriately warm range of reds, browns and ochres, complemented by splashes of intense color. Monochromatic expanses of open space are punctuated with large flocks of sheep tended by herders in vibrantly colored robes. Palm fronds and olive groves have a unique silver-green hue seen nowhere else. Even after dark, when the sky is a deep cobalt blue, sodium vapor lights illuminate the bustling cafes that explode with nightttime activity. The country is certainly one that invites inquiry; the way beauty abounds in an emerging economy, despite the realities of bracing poverty, is in itself a mystery.

Christopher Boffoli is a Seattle-based photographer and film writer-producer. He is currently at work on a number of projects including a pilot for a one-hour series for HBO.