In 2010, on one of my many journeys from Ouarzazate to Marrakesh (at the time we made at least one return trip a week), I stopped to take a photo of some gas cylinders placed on a low wall along the road.
They had probably been put there by the inhabitants of the houses below, to be exchanged with full bottles by a ‘supply’ truck.
I’ve always loved this photo, almost monochrome, the wear and tear of the dented, rusty, out-of-date bottles that should no longer be in service, the long shadows of the late afternoon.
And I immediately recognised my little piece of wall in this recent photo, found on the Association MCA website:
The wall is twelve years older, and has withstood the elements and the earthquake. On the other hand, the houses that you can barely make out from their windows (blue spots surrounded by white) in the first photo have completely disappeared. The landscape is no longer the same, and I imagine that the pretty mosque at the bottom of the valley, with its square minaret and rustic decorations, regularly maintained, has suffered too.
Since the earthquake, I regularly look at all the photos I took during ten years of travelling in the south, Tinmel now threatened, Amiziz, Ouirgane, Asni, so many villages that you could see from the top of the road, without knowing their names.
I was lucky that none of my in-laws were victims of the earthquake. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about the others, with winter approaching ‘at last’, which means bitter cold at night.
And I’ve just realised that I was afraid to return to these superb roads to see this desolate spectacle.
The gas cylinders are an insignificant detail. It takes my visual reflexes as a photographer (and the knowledge I have of ‘where and when’ my photos were taken) to be able to put these two images together with such certainty.
And it made me immerse myself, once again, this evening, in the nostalgia of these landscapes and the sorrow for the people who will suffer for several years, the time to rebuild, the time to mourn too, which will be so much more difficult in an environment where everything reminds you of the trauma of the earthquake.
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