PHOTO GALLERY - Mektoub
ON THE WAY TO MEKTOUB
The Tuareg, a nomadic tribe of the Algerian Sahara, named from the Arabic "The Abandoned of God", hold to the tradition that it is the men and not the women who should veil their faces after puberty. Although the Tuareg are Muslim, their interpretation of the faith allows women much sexual freedom prior to marriage and encourages close platonic friendships with men after they wed. The writings of Paul Bowles, particularly his stories "The Delicate Prey" and "A Distant Episode", and most of all his novel The Sheltering Sky have obsessed me for years. The arid expanse of the Sahara has entered my dream world with all the ritual magic of a Bowles encounter, in shades of baked clay and ochre.
One dream in particular had me perform a rite of passage in the bay of a nameless Moroccan town where the medina reached down to the sea, and while witnessing my crossing, a tribe of veiled men and women urged me through the red and menacing water with their chanting - the slow falling away of the hijab.
With these preoccupations in mind, I set out to describe the body in images that would obscure the usual definition of feminine and masculine principles and with the slow winding and unraveling of the veils, illuminate both the ambiguity and the interplay of the male and female forms.
How we cover and uncover the body in various rituals and traditions, how the expressions of the body, disguised or veiled, mirror the inner landscape, and how the body moves and dances in the particular environment, were all ideas I wished to explore in these images. The use of infrared film assisted in locating the feminine in both my subjects, with the Agfapan film providing the contrasts and the texture to capture their masculine energy.
At times the boundaries blurred, and both subjects were transformed by the particular light. I placed them on a north-west facing beach in the Gulf Islands, yet somehow the variety of textures in the midden mounds provided the austerity and mood of the desert. The sea was a welcome oasis.
I named the sequence "On the way to mektoub", after a quote I found on the making of the Bertolucci film: "There is a silver thread that reaches from the base of the spine to the heavens, where it becomes interwoven in the fabric of destiny. One's own will is meaningless. All is written. This is Mektoub, or fate... In the void created by the absence of will, the spirits of light and darkness have room to move."