Category: photography

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Degrees of Development: A Photo Journal of Morocco

By Mandy Bowers


Many of us have a fuzzy idea in our head of what a developing country looks like, or what the Middle East looks like, or even what Africa looks like. Personally, I had a fuzzy picture in my head of what my experience studying abroad in Morocco this spring term would look like. After ten weeks of extensive travel, plenty of harassment, a loving host family, and regular academic questioning, I now have a clearer picture of a developing country trapped between opposing African, Middle Eastern, and European identities.



The Medina of Fez was founded in the ninth century and reached its peak in the 13th-14thcentury. The sprawling maze of streets and tall buildings was surprisingly cool and has changed little in structure in the past few hundred years. Yet, telltale signs of changing residents grace the tops of the buildings — satellite dishes.



The rush of government-funded buildings in the 1960s and 1970s were poorly constructed, meaning that many homes across Morocco are in danger of collapse. Medinas, or old cities across Morocco, direly need restoration to protect the residents. (pictured: Chefchaouen)



Only in the past fifteen years did Morocco name Berber the official language. Despite its ancient roots and its position as mother tongue to nearly half the population, Berber is only now being introduced as a language taught in schools. The Berber alphabet was resurrected despite criticism from some who believe the language would have greater prospects of survival if written in Arabic or Latin script. In southern and eastern Morocco, where Berber is more prevalent, locals may not speak Arabic or appreciate a foreigner’s efforts to use Moroccan Arabic.



Al-Akhawayn University, Ifrane, was founded in 1994 as a Saudi-Moroccan partnership and is one of few private universities in Morocco. Although the university caters to elite students with its hefty tuition costs, if you ask the director, he will insist that the university is public because they still use the normal, government-run postage system. Ifrane, is called Switzerland of Morocco and is known for its European style homes, skiing, and frequent snowfall.




Some restoration efforts, in the name of tourism, are laughable. Can you see what was restored versus original in this picture? Your hint: the bottom faded before the top. When donors fund restoration projects, lack of oversight usually means that intermediaries choose the cheapest contractors available and pocket the difference. Restoration efforts may therefore be little more than scratching a pattern back into a wall — an outcome better described as vandalism than restoration.






In contrast to typical views of developing countries, Casablanca is now home to “Morocco Mall,” complete with an IMAX theater, a constructed pond overlooking the ocean, a star-studded ceiling, and an indoor aquarium.




A public university in Fez displays a bulletin board with the names and faces of jailed students who boycotted the university. Student governments regularly organize boycotts of classes and exams to oppose the governments’ lack of action on unemployment. The government usually responds with military force, in the guise of police action. All students are required to participate in the boycott, whether they agree or not.






The new opening of a mall in downtown Fez with a Carrefour attracts crowds of Moroccans in their best clothes to see and be seen. A few eighty year old women approach the escalator, remain immobile at the top for thirty seconds in fear of stepping on, and eventually dive back into the crowd that has formed behind them for the safer option: the elevator.




“Paradise Beach” in Assilah, Morocco, may remain an isolated home to sheep. The road out to the beach is so potholed and torn apart that only a four-wheel drive travelling below a mile an hour can reach the hidden beach.



Moroccans associate tourists with wealth, and many Moroccans have learned to cater to tourists in hopes of making a little extra money. Argan farmers harvest and crush Argan nuts to create the famous oil. Goats enjoy eating the nuts and tourists enjoy watching the goats climb the trees to eat the nuts. Thus, Argan farmers enjoy selling tourists photo-ops with baby goats and Argan oil.  



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Witness to History

By Grace Afsari-Mamagani



As the lights dimmed in Filene Auditorium on Wednesday afternoon, photojournalist James Nachtwey ’70 took community members in attendance on a visual and emotional journey. Influenced by images from Vietnam and the civil rights movement during the 1960s, Nachtwey said he began to consider the potential of photography and media to change the course of history and engrain pictures within a cultural collective consciousness.


“At its best, journalism is social intervention,” he said. Journalism, and powerful photography in particular, puts a human face to the abstract issues negotiated by world leaders; documentary photography interprets the stories of citizens on the ground, who feel the real and daily impact of the implications of policy. Photography, according to Nachtwey, is not the end in itself, but a means to the end, a tool for social awareness and tangible results.


Nachtwey — whose first book, Deeds of War, was published in 1989 — began his career as a war photographer in Ireland, documenting the everyday battlefield of Belfast. From there, he went on to photograph soldiers fighting the Central American proxy wars resulting from Cold War politics, car bombers destroying Lebanon in the heat of civil war, and the continued “conquest through… bible and sword” of European oligarchy in Guatemala. When the Berlin Wall fell, he traveled to Romania to document the AIDS epidemic in orphanages, bribing officials in the country with cigarettes, chocolate, and bottles of brandy, he said. “What I witnessed in Romania was nothing less than a crime against humanity,” he explained, his work motivated essentially by the hope that the world would respond.


His second book, Inferno, is a chronicle of crimes against humanity. In the case of his coverage of Somalia, the New York Times ran the story on the front page; the following day “the phones were ringing off the hook with people wanting to know how they could help… I believe that people will care if journalists will give them something to care about.” In the wake of Nachtwey’s photographs, the U.S. government, U.K. print media, and soon the entire world seemed to be paying attention: the UN came to the rescue, and the largest-ever International Red Cross mission saved approximately 1.5 million lives. 

“That’s the power of the press,” he said.


Nachtwey photographed a range of other humanitarian crises, from southern Sudan to Chechnya to Rwanda (the last of which, in the immediate aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s election in South Africa, was akin to “taking the express elevator to hell”).  He traveled to Kabul at the end of the Afghan war, was assigned to an American platoon in Baghdad following 9/11, explored the field of military medicine for National Geographic, photographed hundreds dying of tuberculosis, and documented crime and punishment in America.


“Photographers go to the extreme edges of experience to show a mass audience things they can’t see for themselves,” he said. His craft, despite the horrors he encounters regularly, is one of empowerment, of retaining the dignity of subjects who have nothing left to lose but continue to fight for life; his art, he said, is one contingent upon the sense of right and wrong, an ability to identify with others, and a refusal to accept the unacceptable. For the international community, the war photography produced by Nacthwey constitutes an invaluable service. It compels organizations to offer aid, attracts attention to the horrors we would otherwise forget, and, ultimately, seems to convey some basic humanity. It offers a voice to the marginalized and oppressed and can enact real political change. And it operates under the finally humble reminder to the journalist — and to the individual in the vast immensity of time — that “the stories we work on are far bigger than we are.”