From my notebook
the girl who named everything
Sahara, Morocco · late afternoon
She gave me the photograph. I gave her the name.
A little girl came out of a tent with a handful of toys, sat down in the sand and played as if the whole desert belonged to her. She had almost nothing. She was completely happy.
For a while I forgot I was working at all.
Then she looked up, and smiled.
Not at the camera. Not for anything. One frame, and I knew. Thousands of photographs later it is still the best I have ever taken, and I don’t expect to beat it. The light was ordinary. She wasn’t.
Everything I believe about this work came out of that one second: move slowly, take only what is offered, and wait for the moment people forget the lens. She was doing it before I ever picked up a camera.
So when this needed a name, I didn’t go looking for one. It was already in her picture, in the way she looked at her own desert. I named it after her, and for her.
— Hamza
Nomad’s Eye
Named in her honour: the little nomad of the Sahara who handed me the best frame of my life and asked for nothing back — and for every child still playing in the sand with almost nothing.
What makes us different
Not a service. A way of looking.
Most photographers arrive, shoot and leave. This one sits down first.
-
People before the camera
Tea first, questions second, camera last. By the time I start, the lens has been forgotten, and what comes back is you, not you being photographed.
-
Nothing staged that shouldn’t be
No stiff poses, no colours that were never there. I wait for the real moment, because the real one is the one you still love in ten years.
-
Morocco from the inside
These roads, these families and this light raised me.
If that is the kind of picture you want to keep, we will get along.
Travel with me