Hicham Gardaf is a photographer who was born in Tangier, Morocco, and is currently based in London. Gardaf’s work at its centre poses questions that investigate transformations of contemporary landscape, spatiality and politics of space. Although it’s true that his main medium of expression is photography, he often incorporates various forms of image experimentation such as video and installation into his work as well. His work has been shown at Guest Projects in London, Museum of African Contemporary Art AL Maaden in Marrakech, Beit Beirut in Beirut, La Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

While he was back in Tangier for a brief trip home, I invited Hicham over for coffee and this conversation, in which we dove into how his lifelong love of looking at pictures and images transformed into taking and curating them into his own art. In his soft-spoken and uniquely humble way, Hicham shared how he got to where he is as an artist by recognizing opportunity, his interests in the relationship between photography, painting & cinema, some of Tanger’s history that he has been documenting and researching in terms of development and architecture, his interest in “vague space,” and why, for him, the creative process of being a photographer is backwards.

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SHOW NOTES

-Hicham’s website & instagram -Magnum Photography books
-Hicham’s influential photographers: Gary Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, William Egglestone
-Influential cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke
-Think Tanger, a local arts association
-Gerhard Ritcher (overpainted photographs)
-Georges Perec, French writer

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