Photo Essay – Chefchaouen

“Suppose I were to begin by saying I fell in love with a colour?” opens Maggie Nelson’s book, Bluets (2009), a meditation on love and loss through a blue-tinted lens. Director Abdellatif Kechiche also uses blue as a kind of muse in the recent film Blue is the Warmest Colour, as does iamamiwhoami’s BLUE album released earlier this year; they join a host of writers and artists who have been inspired by the colour.

This photo series documents a whole city suffused with blue: Chefchaouen, nestled in the Rif Mountains in northwest Morocco. Goethe writes, “we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it”, which can be said of Chefchaouen, whose winding medieval streets and blue-washed buildings provide an oasis in the heat of the Moroccan summer. Historically a religious destination, now a popular spot for travellers, the atmosphere captured here is at mystical, serene, and cooling.

Photos by Aoibheann Schwartz. Introduction by Sorcha Gannon.

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