Four Black & White Images From Morocco

I’m still mostly a black and white photographer, goes back to those many years carrying my Leica or Rolleiflex all over on all sorts of adventures with bags of film; then home, maybe a quick shower to scrape off the outer layer of travel dust and sunburned skin, then disappearing into the darkroom for days on end. Come to think of it, this was the perfect dichotomy: wide-open travel and adventure juxtaposed with the lightless solitude of the darkroom itself–but somehow those two balanced as the grand day-night cycles of photography.  So you see, even though I don’t disappear into a shut off dark space, the process lives on, and I still prefer black and white to color–unless I see some image that cries for color for some reason…here are some recent images from Morocco…

Teacher and Children, Madina Fes

I was invited inside this classroom where the children were singing their bi-lingual alphabets from the blackboard, their teacher looking on with her pleased encouragement.

Wall in Rabat, yes, there’s surf here

Shop doorway, in the Fes Madina

The Fes Madina is the world’s largest car-free urban area in the world. It’s a maze containing every urban ingredient (minus autos)  as you can see here: shops like the doorway above to an endless sea of people flowing by…

…or this boy balancing his cane for me, where I employed one of my favorite quotes from Henri Cartier-Bresson: “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”

Hope I’m not boring you with my travel photos, I promise not to set up a slide projector and keep you as a captive audience for days (on second thought, I wonder how I could arrange that?)