Childhood Territories
A text by Abdelghani Fennane
When Henri Cartier-Bresson met the 22 years old Daoud Alouad-Syad in Paris, he recognised his talent as a photographer and advised him to go back to Morocco, his native country, when he was about to join Magnum Agency. Works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, along with Robert Frank and Gilles Peress educated Alould-Sayad’s sensibility on photography. To think of his pictures as author art is essential to the artist though his vocation to depict humankind is even more perceptible to the eye. Humankind affection is confirmed by his later works: “Marocains”, "Territoire de l’Instant”, “Boujaâd”, Traditional Arts Festival artists photography’s and some his latest works in colour.
Daoud Alouad-Syad’s imagination is based on his child- hood memories and his childhood places in Marrakech, especially the vibrant Jemaa El Fna. Also it is important to know that his name “Syad”, meaning “hunter” or "fisherman" (depending not the context) and its comparison to images predation in the photography literature including Susan Sontag or Serpe Tisseron, is obviously revealed in Daoud Aoulad-Syad's prints.
The Ordeal of Death
To explain his interest in photography as a youth, Daoud Alouad-Syad relates one of his teenager tales: “Circus Amar once came to Jemaa El Fna. What I was the most interested in was the fairground surrounding the Circus. I was hanging out with some friends to admire the dancer. Then, back home, I locked myself inside my room and started dancing and imitating him in front of the mirror. Early Sunday morning, I went there to see him again. He saw me dancing like him and asked me to go on stage to dance next to him. I was so happy, I stepped up and the public started clapping. Stepping down, the director gave me one Dirham and asked me to return the next Sunday. The Circus was gone the next Sunday and that night I cried a lot.”
We have all experienced tears of children who believe in an world innocence and, while this memory seems reckless, this feeling remind us of bereavement, of death, fragility and humankind fleetingness. Daoud Alouad-Syad also experienced the bereavement through the deathof father, which he never speaks about, or through his cinema production in “En attendant Pasolini”. His mother is represented both in photography and in cinema. She is, in his mind, a profound and subtle metaphor of his native Morocco and his photography is a tribute to his mother sublime character. His mother’s presence and his father sudden death lay down the Absence-Presence duality as well as the mourning attributed to his works.
The main theme of Daoud Alouad-Syad’s photography is his native country (everyday life, places, charac- ters, broad landscapes, folklore) as if this Moroccan photographer is still inhabited by his young age self, constantly amazed amazement of the world that is prerogative of childhood. It is like through a child eye that combines an instinctive brilliance, innocent happiness and desire for new encounter. Daoud Alouad-Syad’s prints are everyday life anecdotes and with a hint of city streets as in a child’s mem to conceal a furtive expression and the mischievous thought behind. “For, say Roland Barthes, ‘reading’ a country is at first, feeling it though embodiment memo- ries. I think that the photographer is assigned to this body of knowledge and to this distinctive analysis: more aware than competent, aware of the competence interstices. This is why childhood is a royal way to best know a country. Basically, there is no country but childhood”.
Revealing Aoulad-Syad’s consiousness
In a recent interview, Edouard Glissant introduces 3 dimensions of Daoud’s poetry: Landscape (space) because thought colonization, relationship is reduced; Time, it is about making right the « chaos » if not the disorder caused by the same colonization; and finally, Language (regaining one’s language and appropriation of new languages). Poetry in Daoud Aoulad-Syad’s photography gets into these three processes by which the decolonized themes emerge gain in the world. Another clue for this political consciousness is shown in his choices of themes and exclusive predilection for the boundaries: ancestral Morocco, People, countryside, Southern places, this enthralling South that appears also in his movies. Underlying Aoulad-Syad’s work there is a profound negritude claim and land abandonment denunciation, as well as Moroccan culture that reminds him, his tangible African origins. After almost 30 years of absence from showing in galleries, while he was following a long and successful cinematographic career, Daoud Alouad-Syad is back to his first love and share with us a beautiful vintage photography exhibition at the Galerie 127
Abdelghani Fennane is a Poet.
Text originally published under the title« Retour au Pays de l’enfance »,
in Le Soir-Echos, n°1113, 2012.