TANGIERS SERIES

Tangiers, By Chris Sharp, Curator

Taken over the course of two years on trips to Tangiers, Morocco, these photos portray women crossing a street just before or at dawn. The women are seen from the elevated point of view of the photographer's hotel balcony, a factor which, aided by their largely black or white burkas and head-dress, renders them anonymous, inscrutable and even a bit phantasmal, creating, nevertheless, a crisp contrast between their clothing and the obscurity of the pavement. Moving singly or in pairs among the crepuscular light of dawn or the yellow glow of the night street lights, the liminal space of the twenty four cycle through which they traverse seems to coincide with the street and even the image itself, as if all three components conspired toward a meditation on transitoriness. Inaugurating the day, they seem to quietly break the final silence of night the way a body slips into an otherwise still surface of water. And yet the space they occupy is far from placid or unbroken. The deserted intersection itself testifies to the continual, yet absent passage of traffic, registering in a pale criss-cross on the pavement, which in turn structures each image with a kind of simple, urban geometry. Thus do the women who temporarily inhabit this geometry tend to inversely frame it, animating it, like figures on a stark, unadorned board game, ultimately evoking the hooded actors of Samuel Beckett's Quad. Captured, at times, toward the center of the street, they strike one as exposed and vulnerable, while at other times, they linger on the margin of the image, partially eclipsed by the shadow of a tree, and as such, seem to conceal themselves. In either case, their appearance in this vacant time and space of the city possesses a startling quality due in a large part to the at once banal and arresting sense of mystery an outsider is liable to experience in such circumstances, as an outsider, as someone who will most likely never get any closer to the moment he portrays than this.