…was of this magician and healer, likely Tuareg, and surely from the Sahara. I took this picture, then tried to get closer to another healer | storyteller type, and the camera was knocked down to the brickwork in an ancient courtyard or jemaa — in the jostling crowd — and she never woke up again. And I surely tried many techniques, trying to wake her up. 

While there’s no pronouncement against taking pictures, some people simply don’t like it. And they’ll tell you so. Or, they’ll glare, which is, clearly, telling you so. If someone didn’t want a picture taken, even with the snap-lightning techniques I’d developed, they’d do something like this: 

And of course, I wouldn’t take the picture. Except in this instance, I already had — speaking of lightning. 

Personally, my reaches are more to the moment; I’m not trying to set people up, play them, con them or abuse them — even pay them, (though I did have to do that), or finally, in any manner, bother them, in their workaday world. But the imagery is simply unrelentingly astonishing — the colors, the character, the timeless quality of the people. What you see is what you get. And if you see, you cannot help yourself. 

It’s because I love them, that I shoot. And it’s because I love the art of photographing people in place, that I’m driven to risk gathering these images. And finally, of photographing place, in the context of people, that draws me further in…

But this camera, that’s taken me around the world a couple of times, and lasted for at least a couple of years, is now…

dead. 

And no, I don’t believe that I was cursed in losing my camera. Just trying to get too close in a crazily chaotic and lively scene — seen. 

heading to Paris, soon…

tsg | casablanca | morocco