Marrakech Time.

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

MOROCCO | Monday, 23 August 2010 | Views [537]

As you walk past the clothing souk you barely notice the seller: he seems to merge with the caftans and the Arab and Berber djellabas hanging around him. After spending a few days wandering in the souk you begin to recognize this look on every face you see: it’s the look of a man for whom time has no longer any meaning. The souk seller measures time in customers. Once in a while a customer wakes him up from his daze. Once the customer is gone, the seller slides back into his narcotic-like state, locked up behind his vacant stare, until another customer breaks the spell.

Tags: as days go by.

In the butcher’s souk you can find anything you can imagine, from plucked chickens to camel liver, goat heads, camel heads and sheep brain, all ‘tastefully’ displayed on the counter or hanging over it. Amidst live chickens squawking in cages, waiting to be weighed, and scrawny cats prowling underneath the counters bedecked with tongues and lungs, this old man, focused on his work, seems to exist only in the moment even though he must have performed exactly the same movements hundreds of times, on days exactly like this one.

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Walking through the souk is an overwhelming experience: an indescribable variety of sounds, smells and colours are constantly competing for your attention. As you rush through the narrow passageways you feel as though you have been transformed into a giant eye desperately trying to register every little detail. You glance to your right and in that moment, a moment so short that it doesn’t seem to have duration at all, out of the corner of your eye, amidst the ‘clamour of being’ that is the souk, you glimpse a little girl at the end of a narrow side street. It happens so fast that you don’t know if you’ve really seen her: rather you sense her presence. I took this picture while I was walking. It looks blurry because I took it while I was moving: this is not an effect I added later. There was something surreal and serene about the way in which the little girl appeared only to disappear in the next instant. The essence of the souk is exactly this: an endless series of moments, of passing impressions that often don’t have the time to coalesce into conscious perceptions but when they do they produce an aching sensation of the timelessness of this place.

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Marrakech Time.

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

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