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Bruno Barbey was born in Morocco and grew up in various parts of the country: Rabat, Salé, Marrakech and Tangiers. Over the course of his career, Barbey has traveled all over the world, but it is to Morocco that he keeps returning. Central to his more-than 50 years of work in the nation has been his use of color film – a move inspired by an assignment working for Vogue in Brazil in 1966. A respect for local custom has meant that few of Barbey’s Morocco images feature people in the foreground, they are primarily shot from afar, or feature figures bathed shadow. Key also to many of Barbey’s Morocco photographs is an air of abstraction, as Carole Naggar wrote of the vast body of work: “Bruno Barbey has started streamlining his subjects: the people and sites he photographs have become closer to abstractions. It is as if he wants to get to the essence of color. As if traveling through time, he produces serene, musical compositions pulsing with a mixture of longing, memory and emotion, but also suggesting a darker world of secrets behind closed doors.”
