TANGIER, MOROCCO.- The Cervantes Institute in Morocco presents Visions of Morocco, on view through May 5, 2007. This traveling exhibition seeks to familiarize visitors with the vertiginous changes in Morocco’s social and urban reality: a view that mixes with the beauty of its landscapes and its old, picturesque and truly beautiful cities. To do so, a large group of photos from both sides of the Mediterranean were selected, offering an exhaustive view of a country located between tradition and modernity. These excellent pieces not only portray Morocco’s social, artistic, labor, industrial, cultural and anthropological image; they also serve as an important meeting place for two different cultures, two complementary gazes by artists from Spain and Morocco, two countries that are very close, but have been far from each other for too long.

The photos chosen for this show share the same need to erase the borders of geography and time, but not at the expense of Morocco’s landscapes, customs, folklore and ways of life and death. This is the labor that each artist has, nevertheless, tried to approach from a standpoint that is different yet complementary to those of his colleagues in this show. Without falling into the dangerous trap of documentary work, their photos reflect a very personal way of looking, outside any orthodoxy or academicism, on the basis of current esthetic tendencies, plural worlds and sensibilities, sharing diverse manners of understanding photography itself. Among the participating photographers were the Spaniards Toni Catany, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, Isabel Muñoz, José Manuel Navia and Ricky Dávila, and the Moroccans, Joseph Marando, Bruno Barbey, Alí Chraibi, Jamal Mehsa- ni, Daoud Aoulad-Syad.