I found it difficult to make many facial portraits of people in Tangier, my approach having been to ask for people’s permission, and most of the time they did not want their face to be included. However I was able to make a few portraits of some men working, such as a baker and an artisan metal worker (*see ‘Metalwork Drawing’). But I found it particularly difficult to make any facial portraits of women, and I wanted to try and somehow include more women in my project but was finding it challenging how to do this.
Then one day whilst walking along the promenade I saw two women sat talking on a bench, so I made a photograph, which for me was a small way in which I could record these women in a snapshot of ‘everyday’ life in Tangier, whilst at the same time respecting their anonymity as it is only their backs in the photograph.
So this is the kind of short-illustrated example of what I would like to do, where by I could have put next to the above story (*see ‘Women Portrait’).
Also there was a moment whilst sitting in a café with my colleagues that I noticed across the street a wall full of cracked white paint, and this seemed to me to resemble a sort of map, or outline of a journey perhaps, or the contours of land seen from above. Either way it took my interest and I went over and starting filming the ‘lines’ formed through the cracking of paint. From the start I had felt that these lines could be an interesting way of some how representing or exploring the idea of travel, journeys, of leaving behind one’s past perhaps, of the unknown for instance, which were all commented on as being part of the theme of ‘Transition’ in relation to Tangier.
I thought about how in a perhaps quite subtle and abstract way (or at least more abstract than any of the recordings I had made up until that point), these lines could relate to a history of travellers to and from this city, in a non specific but general and hopefully meaningful and interesting way.
During the editing stage, I was storyboarding whilst we discussed narrative approaches to the films, and I came across the idea of using sections of the footage I had of these paint ‘lines’, and having them as a recurring element thorough out the ‘Transition’ film, so that starting early in the narrative this footage would appear, and then every now and again a different section or ‘part of a journey’ for instance would appear again, for different lengths of time, just for a second or two, then a little longer perhaps. I thought it could be interesting to juxtapose this footage alongside the other material.
These different ‘moments’ when one is inspired by something, is something I am interested in writing about and at times combining, with visual ‘bit n pieces’ from my archive in Tangier.
I have things to say about many of the photos and video taken, and the process of working with my colleagues, having meetings together to look at our respective recordings, discuss ideas.
Then also there is the editing stage, in which we stayed up all night, talking about narrative ideas, storyboarding, and attempting to find a rhythm and flow to the visual material in relation the final musical compositions we had been given as MP3 files. The bringing of all this together in a short space of time was intense and exciting, though I think we all felt it was a shame that we had to rush the editing stage so much, and ran out of time to developed the ideas further.