Jazz au Chellah
Jazz au Chellah has run since 1996 inside the Chellah necropolis in Rabat, organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Morocco in partnership with Morocco’s Ministry of Culture, the Wilaya of Rabat-Sale, and the embassies and cultural institutes of EU member states, pairing European jazz musicians with Moroccan artists each year. The concert coverage focused on the intimacy the historic setting allows: low-lit shots of percussion and piano solos captured close to the stage, the musicians’ hands and instruments picked out against the dark of the venue, and wider shots that pull back to show the EU and Moroccan flags flanking the stage.
Gnaoua Festival
The Gnaoua World Music Festival pairs Morocco’s Gnaoua musical tradition with jazz, pop, rock, soul and contemporary world music acts, drawing a diverse international lineup to the port city of Essaouira each year. For the festival’s three days the city fills with markets, street performances and walkabout theatre alongside the main stages. This street-level coverage, shot across the 2014 and 2015 editions, stayed close to the ground: traditional Gnaoua musicians photographed mid-performance in their ceremonial dress, families moving through the crowded medina streets between stages, and the wind-blown, sea-facing crowds gathered along Essaouira’s ramparts.
Mawazine
Mawazine, Rythmes du Monde, is one of the largest music festivals in the world, held annually in Rabat. This coverage is from the 2017 edition, the festival’s 16th year, whose closing night brought together British rock singer Rod Stewart, Ivorian reggae artist Alpha Blondy, Syrian singer Georges Wassouf and Lebanese artist Jahida Wehbe on the same bill, reflecting the festival’s musical range. The coverage was built around that scale: wide shots of stage lighting rigs and the crowd during headline sets, balanced against quieter portraits of musicians shot between performances, away from the main stage energy.
HUAWEI
Huawei is a Chinese multinational telecommunications and networking equipment company headquartered in Shenzhen, the largest telecom equipment maker in the world since overtaking Ericsson in 2012, and ranked 72nd on the Fortune Global 500 in 2018. This coverage documented one of its engineering partner conventions for the Africa region. The shoot followed the conference’s formal structure, branded signage and step-and-repeat walls establishing the event’s identity, wide shots of the partner floor, through to its business outcome: the signing of partnership agreements between Huawei and its regional partners, photographed at the moment of signature.
World Refugee Day and asylum seekers | GIZ Morocco
World Refugee Day marks a shift in Morocco’s own migration story: historically a country people left, it has increasingly become a country people arrive in, with the number of asylum seekers roughly tripling in recent years to around 2,937 by April 2015, most coming from Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cote d’Ivoire. This event coverage documented a six-day program run by GIZ Morocco and its partners around the occasion. The shoot moved between registers over the course of the program: children’s workshop drawings photographed as flat-lay documentation of the activities on offer, group portraits of participants and organizers, and the signage and banners that marked the celebration’s presence at each venue.
YOUTH INNOVATION SUMMIT
The Youth Innovation Summit is a five-day program that puts 100 selected young people to work in an Innovation Lab on creative solutions to some of Morocco’s biggest social and economic challenges, culminating in a public Youth Dialogue Festival for dialogue, inspiration and discussion. This event coverage was shot to capture both the summit’s atmosphere and its substance. The night-time crowd shots convey the scale and energy of the audience, while the on-stage moments, handshakes, keynote addresses, project presentations, document the actual content of the program: young innovators presenting their solutions to an audience and panel.
Lead Morocco
Lead Morocco runs a girls’ football program built around leadership development as much as the sport itself, and this photo series followed both sides of that mission. On the pitch, the coverage captured training drills and team huddles during active practice sessions, showing the girls as a functioning team. Off the pitch, it moved into the mentorship sessions that give the program its name, smaller group conversations and coaching moments focused on leadership rather than technique. Structuring the series around both halves of the program reflects Lead Morocco’s own framing of football as a vehicle for something broader than athletic development.
Karacena / Tramway
Event coverage of Karacena’s outdoor dance performance staged in the open plaza beside the Rabat-Salé tramway in Morocco, turning a public transit space into an impromptu stage. The series captures the troupe’s acrobatic leaps and choreography, moving between tribal-inspired and contemporary costume across the performance, with a gathered public audience — commuters and passersby alike — framing the dancers on every side.