Insh’Allah is a journey into Fes. Beyond its impressive, ancient and medieval walls I found a group of young Moroccans, as intrigued in me and where I was from, as I was in them. I asked them questions, methodically recorded their responses and photographed our interactions:
Are you a Moroccan first or a Muslim? Where in the world would you like to go to and why? What ideas do foreigners have about Moroccans? What ideologies do you have about foreigners?
The resulting work is a conceptual yet journalistic response to these encounters. In allowing those I photographed to drive the narrative forward Insh’Allah resists being a collection of cultural stereotypes. Insightful extracts of these dialogues are interspersed with photographs revealing the disparities between how people feel and how others perceive them to be. The images and spaces of the pages allow for a freedom to interpret, digest and explore personal responses to cultural representation. The fragmented narrative is stylistically harmonious reflecting the realism of lived experience creating tensions between the expected and the unexpected.
Insh’Allah is a photo story about real people. Grounded in the realms of reality it connects the individuals of the story with their audience conveying the ambiguities and misconceptions we all encounter when attempting to understand ‘each-other’.