Marrakech, and Why It Is Called the Red City
The walls of Marrakech are made from the ground they stand on, which is why the whole city changes colour as the sun moves.
Built from its own ground
Marrakech was founded in the second half of the eleventh century under the Almoravids, and much of the old city is built from pisé — rammed earth, packed into forms and left to cure. The earth is local, and it carries a high iron content, which gives it the red-ochre colour the city is named for.
This matters to a photographer more than it sounds. The city is not painted a colour; it is the colour of the material it is made from. That means it responds to light the way ground responds to light, not the way a painted surface does. It goes flat and dusty at noon and comes alive at either end of the day.
The pink hour
Late in the afternoon the walls shift from ochre through terracotta to a genuine pink, and hold there for perhaps twenty minutes before the colour drops out entirely. Everyone who has photographed Marrakech knows about this window, which is precisely why it is difficult — the light is doing so much of the work that it is easy to produce something that is about the light and nothing else.
The frame we kept is quiet. A wall, an ordinary street, no landmark. If the picture works, it works because of the colour of the earth, and that felt like the honest way to photograph a city named for exactly that.
Inside the souks
The souks north of Jemaa el-Fnaa are covered, and the roofing is often slatted or partial, so the light arrives in bars and patches. It is high contrast and it moves. You cannot control it and there is no point trying; you find a spot where the light falls somewhere useful and wait for the street to arrange itself.
Two prints came out of that. One is layered — stalls receding into each other until the depth collapses. The other is a bazaar frontage with the Atlas name on it, which is the kind of small detail that tells you where you are without needing a caption.
Away from the crowd
Not everything here is the medina. There are gardens in the city where the planting is dense enough to cut the noise entirely, and where the interest is structural rather than architectural — palm, cactus, the geometry of leaves against a plain wall. Those pictures are the counterweight to the souk frames. A room of prints needs somewhere for the eye to rest.
There is also the tea room, which is the closest thing in this set to an interior portrait of a place: light through a doorway, worn surfaces, nobody hurrying.
