Street in Ouazzane
Ouazzane, Morocco 2006
It’s not easy to come across photogenic people or places. Often when we do visit an interesting place, it’s mid-day. Or the place simply doesn’t live up to its history. This photo is of a street in a small town in Northern Morocco. I’ve never liked the scene. I didn’t like it when I shot it but I was hoping for a miracle from the arches.
This is a slide and it should be easy to discard a slide. Just have your wastebasket handy. But I can’t. I don’t like the image but it’s a memory of a certain day: not an especially good day, but for some reason my brain stored this memory in the Important file. It’s a bright clear memory, an HDR memory, and I don’t want to part with it. I tried many times to make the arches into something that I want to look at. It never worked.
Years pass. I forget the image and my walk in Ouazzane until one day I click on a folder and the red arches fill my screen again. Ouazzane memories flood my mind. A hot day. An empty town. It’s siesta time. Me walking doggedly behind my guide, Mohammed, and an overweight man dressed in a dirty djellaba who pretends to be our “city guide”. The town is not large but the twisting streets go on and on like strands of cooked spaghetti. Mohammed, who is about 30 years younger than I am, tells me his legs hurt. We visit the home of our self-appointed guide and drink a glass of tea. The guide begins to complain about how poor he is. He wants money. We expected that from the beginning. We hand over a decent amount. It isn’t enough. We argue. I say take it or leave it. He hands it back. I get in the car still shoving the money at the man. He still refuses. We drive off. But his son stands at the end of the road. He takes the money. The father’s face is not ‘black’. He has not taken less than he asked for. It’s a Moroccan thing.
I recommend www.adventureswithali.com if you want to visit Morocco and learn about its people and customs.
P.S. I finally got the photo of the red arches in Ouazzane to please me. Lots of layers of my ‘prisms’ and heavy use of Photoshop. The arches are still there and the happy colors are my memories.