Breaking the Mould

I used to be an art teacher in a high school in Marrakech. I found my work there so boring that I came up with the idea of photographing my students on an almost daily basis – just to kill time. In 1994, after three years of teaching, I started the series The Classroom.

At first, I simply took portraits of each of my students, but I soon felt the need to go further, imagining unlikely scenarios for them. I would get one or more of them to pose, giving them instructions like: ‘Lie on the ground’ or ‘Climb on a table’. The students would participate gleefully in these photoshoots as a form of escapism. Even if the taking of each photograph lasted only a few seconds, in those moments they felt free.

I was thinking a lot about the idea of confinement at the time, since I, too, felt trapped in the classroom for four hours a day during my 13 years as a teacher. In a wider sense, I also felt confined within a traditional and seemingly immutable Moroccan society: I wasn’t allowed to leave my country for professional reasons; I couldn’t practice any religion other than the Islamic faith of my ancestors; and I couldn’t have a political opinion that differed from the one imposed on citizens by the state.

In one photograph – in which two boys are joined together by a double-ended woollen hat that a seamstress friend of mine had made – I wanted to reflect the idea that all Moroccan citizens are alike. To me, they are politically and socially conditioned to fit the same mould. Within Moroccan society, it seems family, community, or even the Ummah (Islamic community), prevails over the individual. The ‘we’ eclipses the ‘I’.

The last photograph from The Classroom was taken in 2002. After that, I decided to leave the teaching profession so that I could move abroad and express myself more freely. Looking at my photographs 20 years later, I’m reminded that the country hasn’t changed all that much. I know that had I remained a teacher in Morocco, I would have continued to make the same kinds of images. After all, the country remains largely in the grip of its past.

^{Twenty-one prints from The Classroom series were presented anonymously in 2015.}

^{Hicham Benohoud is an artist who lives and works between Paris and Casablanca. His words have been translated from French by Nolwenn Davies.}