Visa IV, Casablanca, Jean-Christophe Ballot & Brahim Alaoui

"It's no coincidence that Jean-Christophe Ballot, an architect by training who devotes most of his photographic work to the urban landscape, has produced some thought-provoking photos of Casablanca that reveal the fascination this city exerts on those who question its future and its memory.

From the outset, he invites us to approach Casablanca from its waterfront, through its landscape of breakwaters, basins and quays, where the Portuguese conquerors landed and gave the city its name of Casa Branca in the 15th century. It's the sea, too, that lifts the suffocating mists that drown Casablanca's outlines and stretches the clouds of its horizon between sky and land, as if to remind us that the city is its own, that it was the sea that gave birth to it and shaped it from the port. The port is the city's nerve center, where the photographer captures images that are serene, static and uncluttered, all captured frontally. Cranes, silos and ship hulls are treated as artifacts of modernity. Facing the port, the old medina stands firm, with its dazzlingly white houses, built on a human scale and now threatened with crumbling."

Filigranes Éditions, 2002
Text in French
Soft cover
12.3 x 16.5 cm
64 pages
ISBN : 978-2-914381-31-4