The Tanneries of Fes
Inside Chouara, where leather has been cured in stone vats by hand for centuries, and the light arrives only in the middle of the day.
A honeycomb of stone
Seen from the terrace of a leather shop, the Chouara tannery reads as a grid — dozens of round stone vats set into the ground, each one filled with liquid of a different colour, each one worked by someone standing waist-deep in it. The pattern is the first thing a camera notices. The labour is the second.
Chouara is the largest of the tanneries in Fes el-Bali, the older of the city's two walled medinas and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The methods used here are commonly described as largely unchanged since the medieval period: hides are cured, stripped, softened and dyed by hand, moved between vats by workers who do the same sequence every day.
The vats divide roughly into two groups. The pale ones come first — a caustic white mixture used to loosen hair and flesh from the raw hide. Only after that does the leather reach the colours most visitors photograph.
Where the colour comes from
The dyes are traditionally natural: poppy for red, turmeric or saffron for yellow, indigo for blue, henna for orange, mint for green. In practice the tannery is a working industry rather than a museum, and modern pigments appear alongside the old ones. What has not changed is the shape of the work — a person, a vat, a hide, and time.
That mixture of the ancient and the ordinary is what we kept returning to. It is tempting to photograph a place like this purely as pattern, from above, where the vats become an abstraction. It is more honest to also stand close enough that the pattern breaks and you can see a cart, a pair of hands, a stack of hides waiting.
The light is on a schedule
The tannery sits low, enclosed by tall buildings. For most of the day the vats are in shadow and their colour goes flat and grey. There is a window either side of midday when the sun clears the surrounding walls and drops directly into the pits, and the dyes suddenly read at full saturation.
It is a short window, and it is unforgiving — hard overhead light, deep shadow at the vat edges, no softening. We work slowly and wait for light rather than chase it, but this is one of the few places where the light sets the timetable and you simply have to be standing there when it arrives.
The smell is worth mentioning, because every account of Fes mentions it and every account is right. Shops at the entrance hand visitors a sprig of mint to hold under the nose. It helps less than you would hope.
What we brought back
Six photographs, all made within a few hundred metres of each other. Two look down at the geometry of the vats. Two look across at the work itself. One follows a cart of hides through a passage, and one is simply a single vat, still, with nobody in it — the quietest frame of the set and the one that took longest to wait for.
