A Photographer’s Sartorial Chronicle of Moroccan Youth Tradition

In the summer season of 2015, Sophia El Bahja was nearing the top of her research in her hometown of Rabat. Before enrolling in a three-year engineering course on the Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of Tangier, she deliberate to spend time within the Moroccan capital together with her buddies—however her mother and father had different concepts, together with having the then twenty-year-old journey with them.

El Bahja was so upset by her mother and father’ request that they purchased her a brand new digital digital camera to persuade her to hitch them. It labored. With the gear in hand, she started taking images and recording vlogs documenting the journey she had beforehand refused.

“At the time, I wasn’t excited about it at all, but it ended up becoming one of the best travel and self-discovery experiences of my life,” she says. For El Bahja, it opened a brand new path towards turning into a self-taught skilled photographer.

Having a digital camera she may name her personal was new for El Bahja, although she grew up round cameras. Her father had cofounded a pictures cooperative with buddies in Rabat that was energetic between 1977 and 1981; they educated budding photographers, experimented in a darkroom, and arranged pictures excursions. He additionally labored at Morocco’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs within the cultural-heritage division, the place he documented the nation’s monuments, cultural occasions, and traditions. His reverence for Moroccan tradition and its individuals discovered its manner into his daughter’s work.

El Bahja’s photographs goal to showcase the variety of Morocco by way of a mix of heritage and modernity. “I really love my country,” she says. “We tend to go with modernity [in my generation], but our roots and our history—we shouldn’t forget about that.” To preserve her nation’s roots alive, she intentionally incorporates conventional aesthetics with influences from the West.

A 12 months after receiving the digital camera from her mother and father, El Bahja started experimenting with avenue pictures utilizing each her digital camera and her cellphone, and finally she organized her first conceptual photograph shoot. A second shoot in 2018, in her hometown of Rabat with dancer Karim Ennoury, resulted in a picture used the next 12 months as the duvet of the native journal Sortir. Throughout this era, she continued to seize avenue scenes and doc her life together with her cellphone and digital camera.

Also in 2019—a 12 months El Bahja describes as “formative”—she cofounded Tafanoun, a inventive studio for youth expression, together with her now husband, Walid Machrouh. El Bahja produced and edited all of the movies herself, which gave her a crash course in postproduction and artistic path. Her filming stopped abruptly in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In January 2024, she says, she realized “it was time to focus fully on photography.” To nurture that resolve with out entry to formal coaching, she took on-line programs to study technical abilities together with colour correction, practiced by way of a number of photograph shoots, and, within the course of, “gradually discovered my love for fashion and art photography.” During her first 12 months as an expert, El Bahja organized a minimum of two photograph shoots every week. Over time, with extra expertise, she determined to shoot much less and as a substitute give attention to creating narratives that mix Morrocco’s previous and current.

In the challenge Re-Connected, a part of her sequence Marroki Export (2024-ongoing) depicting totally different swaths of Moroccan youth, El Bahja photographed two fashions—styled as imaginary siblings—who dwell outdoors Morocco however are deeply related to the nation. They are wearing upcycled Adidas outfits and pose in opposition to the Old Medina of Rabat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The images from Re-Connected had been additionally partly shot in a conventional home to signify a “grandparents’ home,” as El Bahja’s places it, and the significance of elders as everlasting symbols of belonging, regardless of histories of migration or alienation.

El Bahja all the time has intensive conversations together with her topics earlier than photographing them. Their private tales are as a lot part of her shoots—and affect them as deeply—because the tales of the cities that function her backdrops. She additionally works because the communications and advertising director of Rabat’s Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, a nongovernmental group that helps younger entrepreneurs and artistic changemakers.

There is a pressure in Morocco, El Bahja says, between custom and reinvention. In some methods, her photographs hope to not resolve that pressure however give it the eye it deserves. Her final objective is to “stay authentic,” which to her consists of emphasizing quite than downplaying the unresolved features of recent Moroccan youth tradition.

Read extra from our sequence “Introducing,” which highlights thrilling new voices in pictures.