On symmetry and serendipity - a photograph in Marrakech
Here’s a photograph from my last trip to Marrakech:
Sit, my friends, and I shall tell you the long, rambling, obsessive tale of how I took it…
The building is the Ben Youssef Medersa, up in the northern half of the medina of Marrakech, just above the souks. This stunning old Islamic college was founded in the 14th century, but what we see of it today mostly dates to the middle of the 16th century. Moroccan Medersas, or Madrassas, or any number of other possible spellings, are one of the most beautiful architectural typologies I’ve ever seen. Non-muslims aren’t allowed to enter the mosques in Morocco, so these former colleges are one of the few types of buildings where you get to see all the craft of traditional Moroccan architecture in a religious context. The details vary from building to building, but they are always serene, calm, and beautifully constructed places. I’m normally a pretty loud, chatty guy, and Morocco is normally a pretty loud, exciting place. But the first time I visited a Madersa in Fez I was honestly struck dumb. Reverence rules in these beautiful courtyard buildings. Here’s a shot of the Bou Inania Medersa in Fez, and a couple of cats who live there.
In such a place, you can’t help but want to take photos. As with many great places, you can’t really appreciate the atmosphere fully unless you’re actually there. The combination of material, sound, temperature, and of course the contrast between inside these buildings and out, are all too much to convey in a photograph. Still, the visual treat alone is one I can’t resist sharing. Part of this is the exquisite craftsmanship of traditional Moroccan architecture. You’ll find it in palaces and houses too, but I feel the three key material traditions are best shown in religious buildings like mosques, medersas, and tombs. They are, in no particular order:
Zellige
Tiling of quite incredible intricacy and patterning. Each segment is chiselled into shape by hand, and the joins between them are - at least in the finest examples - paper-thin.
Carved plaster
Again, intricacy is key. It’s layered on and then carved in-situ while still not quite fully dry. The plaster will often - as in the linear parts in this photo - be carved into highly ornamental verses from the Qur’an.
Cedar
The wood of choice in Morocco. It grows in the hills of the Mid Atlas, and its smell is quite wonderful - you soon learn to recognise it as you move through the city. Once again carved with tremendous care and detail, It’s normally left untreated, and it’s only really in old buildings in need of maintenance that you’ll see any degradation after hundreds of years of exposure to the sun.
While the streets of the medina outside can be loud, dirty and hot, the shady courtyards around which Medersas are formed are always calm, clean, and wonderfully cool. (As someone who lives in Scotland, the idea of avoiding the sun always takes a little while for me to get used to when I visit!) Every Medersa I’ve seen has been highly symmetrical, entering from the centre of one side of the rectangular courtyard, and facing towards the qibla wall opposite, to which students would face whilst in prayer. Water is almost always present in some fashion, normally right in the centre of the open courtyard - possibly a fountain, possibly a larger pool. In generations gone by, this water had ritualistic importance for washing before prayer, and it still helps keep the temperature down and offers beautiful reflections of the building around them, a photographic opportunity I’ve always had trouble resisting.
The Islamic tradition of decoration without illustration means that the composition of architecture, facade, and pattern are all gloriously geometrical, and while there is an absolute feast for the eye in the details, the whole can be also appreciated without distraction. Patterns of incredible intricacy repeat, and become larger systems of architectural composition. Symmetry is everywhere, and the whole experience is one of beauty derived through rigourous and careful order.
It’s a wonder to experience, for sure, but how best to photograph it?
Well, there are a million opportunities in the Medersa Ben Youssef for obsessing on the details, and to be honest you can’t really help yourself:
One way of expressing a rigorously ordered space is with a bit of contrast - modern technology in the ancient building, hints of decay amongst the order, or a sign of organic, human activity against all that rigourous geometry. Again, hard to resist:
But beyond these, I wanted to get the overall shot. The descriptive photo which shows the building in one single move, free from distractions and absolutely straightforward. I wanted a symmetrical shot, looking right along the reflective pool to the entrance wall. Not much of a challenge, right? Well…
Shadows
Here’s a shot of the Medersa I took on my first visit - admittedly over-tweaked - just to make the following point: I love the bright sunshine of Morocco, but it sure can cause some distracting contrast. It’s especially intrusive when reflected - look at those bold diagonal lines on the left, cutting into the photo, and the difference in both lighting and reflection between left and right - those areas of the building are identical, but the shadows tell a distracting visual story. That’s not necessarily bad, of course, but for the specific shot I was after, I wanted perfectly symmetrical shadows and reflections to match the formality of the building.
Luckily, that’s easy to arrange. You just have to be in the right place at the right time. I already knew the place, and the right time was a simple thing to work out using one of my regular stand-by tools: SunCalc. It maps the movement of the sun, relative to any given location on earth, through time. If you want to stand somewhere and have the sun shining in a particular direction, it will tell you exactly when to do it. Traditionally, the Qibla Wall of a Mosque or Medersa should face Mecca, which is almost perfectly due east of Marrakech. Not so the Medersa Ben Youssef, though: you can see how skewed it is in relation to the mosque next door! Not to worry: SunCalc handily informed me that for the date I wanted to visit, shadows would be perfectly symmetrical just after noon. Now there was nothing stopping me from getting the shot I had been chasing, except perhaps…
Tourists
…You see, I was on holiday. I wasn’t invited by the Medersa to take any of these photographs. I didn’t have any control over what was happening in there at any point. More than anything, I wasn’t alone: The Medersa is - rightly - full of tourists at almost all times. And big groups of them, too, following their guides like ducklings. In brightly coloured shorts, and hats, and backpacks. It makes for some fun ‘moment’ shots, but these people - many dozens of us at any one moment - were a serious challenge to my calm, empty shot of the building on its own.
So, the tourists were out of my control. As were…
Fountains
The small fountains around the pool are wonderful. They keep the water moving and make a lovely calming sound. I was really keen to get a nice smooth reflection, though, and for that you want still water. When on commission it’s easy to ask for this kind of thing, but on holiday? It was out of my control again.
And so I waited for the shot. We arrived with plenty of time before the critical moment of symmetrical sunlight, and of course the place was packed. Massive gangs of tourists wandering around, leaning out of windows, peering at the zellige, dipping their hands in the pool… I completely sympathised with them - heck, I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t one myself - but in my head I was begging with them all to just leave. Just go. Get out of here, or get behind me, just for a few minutes, please…
With ten minutes to go, I positioned myself bang at the end of the pool, right over the fountain in the middle - helpfully demonstrated by my wife, here. If only the fountain wasn’t running, I thought, it might make a half-decent stable point on which to rest the camera, nice and close to the water surface. Tourists were still milling around, but was I imagining it? Were their numbers dropping? We were entering the period of symmetrical shadows, and I probably had a ten minute window in which to get my shot.
All of a sudden, the fountains stopped.
It was 12:15 - were they programmed to automatically do it? A funny time to set such things. Maybe some nice member of staff turned them off at this time every day, just in case there were photographers like me, waiting for that specific moment? How long would they be off? Did I have five minutes or just one? A few minutes to let the water calm down, and I began shooting. Heck, if the tourists stayed at low numbers, I might be able to phudge a few different images together afterwards to get my image, cropping the tourists out from area to area.
And then they left, too. They all just disappeared. They’d got the pictures they wanted, and they all just left, right at the perfect moment for me to get what I was after. Only about nine people remained in the courtyard, and every one of them was behind me.
Click, click, click. Adjust the bracketing, adjust the speed, try the polariser - I had time to do it all. For a few utterly unlikely minutes, I had a perfectly empty building, perfectly bright sunshine, perfectly symmetrical shadows, and a perfectly still reflection pool. It all just clicked. As did I.
In the end, I’m not even sure if it’s my favourite photograph of this building, but I do know it was by far the most unlikely. There were simply too many factors aligning by chance for me to ever predict I’d be able to do it again.
So, my many many thanks to the people behind SunCalc. Thanks to the dozens of tourists who all left at the right time. Thanks to whoever controlled that fountain timer, and thanks to my fab wife for putting up with me going on endlessly about how unlikely and great it all was.
And thanks to you, too, for reading. Shorter post next time - honest!
All photographs copyright Dave Morris 2011
