Notes on Disappearance
Text by Hicham Gardaf
Published in Hapax Magazine, 2026
Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going?
— Tennessee Williams
Upon approaching Tangier via la nationale (N1), a billboard rose from the roadside, greeting anyone driving by with bold letters: TANGER EXPO 2012. I cannot recall the exact year such signs first began to appear, though I believe it was around 2007, when I started university, and soon after Morocco unveiled the first phase of Tanger Med, the vast new harbour stretching into the Mediterranean some thirty miles east of the city. Tangier stood little chance of securing the International Exhibition against its rivals, Cracow and Yeosu, yet the mere prospect of it seemed enough to awaken hope in the long-latent city and infuse its citizens with a renewed drive toward economic recovery and growth.
For as long as I can remember, Tangier’s identity has existed in relation to its past. Those I spoke to who lived through the sixties and seventies appear suspended in what they call Tangier’s golden age. They, like generations before them, have nourished an imaginary city that my own generation once believed might have existed. Tangier’s memory is passed down like a cherished treasure. Its myths and ghosts linger to this day, still drawing visitors in search of traces left by the likes of Henri Matisse, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Francis Bacon, Paul Bowles, and others.
During my first years working as a bookseller at Les Insolites, I met many writers, artists, filmmakers, and literary enthusiasts, all drawn here by the same impulse: to seek out the ghosts of Tangier’s past. I came to understand that this past, unlike any other in Morocco, remains the city’s enduring currency. My interest in photography began during those years, surrounded by photography and artists’ books, and through encounters with photographers who visited the shop. At the time, I was still enrolled in a master’s in economics, which I would quit a year later in favour of becoming a photographer. I wasn’t entirely sure why I made that decision, though it was most likely out of discontent with the course and the university system as a whole. Photography seemed to offer a gateway to freedom.
I lost my father at the age of thirteen. For him, education was more than a vocation, and I believe I carried, for a long time, his wish that I might rise high in the corporate hierarchy. But deep down, I wanted to break free from that burden. I grew up as an only child in a small village in northern Morocco, to parents who were both teachers. Though I had half-siblings, we only came to know each other after my father’s passing. I literally lived inside the school; my whole world revolved around it. That may be how I developed a taste for solitude and struggled so deeply with social interactions. Perhaps that is why photography felt so emancipating: I could walk up to a complete stranger and feel at ease speaking to them with a camera around my neck.
My first photographs were of close friends and family. Gradually, I expanded my circle to include neighbours and strangers I met in the street. The longer I practiced photography, the further I moved away from photographing people. In fact, I stopped taking photographs altogether for almost a year. A text by Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris—a collection of observations written as Perec sat in Saint-Sulpice Square, describing the things that usually go unnoticed—inspired me to pick up my camera again. I began a similar experiment, visiting Tangier’s bay daily and photographing whatever caught my eye: often mundane, unremarkable scenes, yet always with an anticipation to find the unexpected.
After two weeks of daily visits, I came across a large billboard announcing a new redevelopment plan for the area. All the cafés and restaurants along the bay, places bound to my childhood memories, were suddenly facing demolition. I remember taking a photograph behind that billboard of a girl dressed in a red sweater and a bluish-grey dress, colours that matched the sky almost perfectly. Perhaps this was the photograph I had been waiting for.
Reflecting on his native Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk once described how certain places—a fountain, a square, a hill—become coordinates of our personal histories. When they vanish, so do the landmarks of our memories. Urban architecture and streets are not only what define a city’s physical form, but also the intimate details that shape our sense of self. We resist their destruction because, when a building or a fountain disappears, a part of us disappears with it. To say keep that fountain is to say keep my memories intact.
In this sense, photographs assume a complex role. They become an index of an index, a record of what once anchored our memories. And when these places are gone, photographs offer a space to return to, if only in the mind.
Records of a Vanishing Structure began with the first photograph of the billboard, taken in the summer of 2016 while driving with my mother from Tangier to Asilah. The sun was high and vertical, and the wind, the wind so strong I feared it might tear the metal structure apart. I took two pictures and drove off, deciding to return on a different day and at a different time.
That same year, I moved to London, the first time I would live abroad. By then, the announcement TANGER EXPO 2012 had already vanished, along with the momentum that was born with it. All that remained was its skeleton, the ghost of that era. Returning to photograph the billboard each year, with every visit to Morocco, became a ritual: a way to revive my connection to the place, a connection that faded a little more each year as my bearings did too.
New memories were born: fleeting encounters with people driving or cycling off the road, a herdsman walking his sheep, a stray dog, migrant birds, and the silence that precedes the break of day. These instances might seem of little importance, yet they remain etched in my memory and bring me quiet joy each time I look at those blunt, formal photographs.
Lately, I have rewatched a 1985 visual essay by John Berger, in which he tells and reads enigmatic stories about our desire to outwit time, ideas he had explored a year earlier in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. His words resonate deeply with me (and his voice, as always, feels comforting):
People everywhere have dreamed and told stories about the good time before the bad time, the bad time of the present. The Golden Age, the Garden of Eden, the time before the fall, before consciousness, before time. And if we didn’t believe that somewhere along the way something had gone wrong or been lost, life might seem too bitter. These distant dreams of a golden age help us come to terms with living in the present, and with our irrepressible desire for happiness.
I now think of the little girl in the red sweater and wonder if she would remember our meeting. Now that all the cafés and restaurants are gone, would her memory of Tangier’s bay be tied to that same billboard? I wonder.
—
References:
Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963
Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975).
Orhan Pamuk, “The Texture of Istanbul,” Louisiana Channel (2024).
John Berger, Once Upon a Time, in About Time (Channel 4, 1985), co-devised and directed with Mike Dibb and Christopher Rawlence.