Tuareg

"Tuareg" was made across seven days in Erg Chigaga, in the far south of Morocco, where Ennou stayed with the families who live in the sand sea. The work emerged from conversation rather than pursuit. Between the tea, the loading of the camels and the long hours when the light is unusable, the men and women he stayed with told him their stories, and one anxiety surfaced in nearly all of them. They are no longer certain their way of living will outlast them.
Ennou photographs that uncertainty without illustrating it. The frames hold what the desert asks of people: rope tied and retied, tents patched with whatever the last season left behind, water carried in plastic drums, a young palm braced in concrete against a wind that has nothing to break it. "They were not mourning the desert," he says. "They were mourning the fact that their children have already seen somewhere else. A phone arrives, the signal arrives, and the city becomes visible from inside the tent. After that nobody can be asked to stay for the reason their grandfather stayed."
The series settles on that fracture, between a knowledge assembled over centuries and a generation that can now watch an alternative to it nightly, in the palm of a hand. The portraits are of people still doing the work, guiding and herding, setting out the low stools for visitors who will be gone by morning. Around them sits the evidence of an economy that has already turned, in which the desert is increasingly something to be shown rather than inhabited. What Ennou records is the last stretch of an overlap, the brief period in which the old life and its replacement are still standing inside the same frame. He returns to it because it is closing.