Statement

Photography

My journey into photography was initiated with a tactile bond – a camera, a gift from my father, equipped with an unyielding 35mm lens. This object, which I received as a 13-year-old in the vibrant quarters of Derb Sultan in Casablanca, served as my lens into the world, compelling me to focus on the minutiae of life, turning ordinary detail into extraordinary narrative. The camera was both an extension of my vision and a limitation, its fixed lens dictating the intimacy and proximity that would define my artistic trajectory. My practice thus evolved, organically, from close photography to text photography, a testament to the texture of my surroundings, imprinted with layers of human activity and communication.

As my interest in aviation burgeoned, I found myself drawn to the language of the aerodrome, a dialect made of markings on aircraft and the ground. These symbols, mysterious injunctions issued by the aviation industry, became an intimate subject of my photography, leading me to explore a vision from above, bringing the language of the sky to the ground. Today, the drone allows me to push the boundaries of my gaze, bridging my past as a pedestrian observer and my current perspective as an aerial narrator.

At the core of my practice lie text markings, close photography, and aerial photography, modalities that echo the influence of Land Art and Conceptual Art, and its key figures. These modalities resonate with the words of Rosalind Krauss, who proclaimed, "The frame announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign."¹ My photography thus becomes a language, articulating the markings of human presence in the world. My immersion into the critical works of Willem Flusser, Susan Sontag, and particularly Roland Barthes, whose "Mythologies" provided a critical lens through which I could analyse my own work, informed and enriched my practice.

When the iPhone emerged, it offered a new channel to journal my encounters, enabling me to translate diverse experiences – aerial, text, and street – into visual narratives. Photography, the medium that has always accompanied me, became an even more vital conduit for expression after my transformative studies with Philippe Oudard in the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers. There, in the enchanting seclusion of the darkroom, I honed my craft, producing black and white prints and later colour at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

My work dialogues with the visual poetry of figures such as Kasimir Malevich, Robert Petschow, Bernard Queeckers, Alfred Stieglitz, Joseph Kossuth, Richard Long, William Bennett, Jan Dibbets, John Hillard, Pierre Boogaerts, and particularly Denis Roche, whose contributions to photography and literature deeply resonate with my own preoccupation with the textuality of images. I am a photographer driven by the exploration of the human condition, a pursuit rooted in the fertile grounds of Casablanca and cultivated in the creative vitality of Paris. Every click of the shutter, every image captured, is a homage to my journey, a narration of my evolution from a boy with a fixed-lens camera in the Derb Sultan neighbourhood to the artist I am today.

— Moe Louanjli, July 2023.

¹Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, p.115, MIT Press, 1986.