Mon Maroc, My Eyes

For Hanadi Sharaf, Morocco was never just a place on a map — it was a constellation of stories, colors, and emotions carried across generations.
Before she ever set foot there, it lived within her through her mother’s memories: a vivid mosaic of landscapes, scents, and light, recounted to a daughter growing up in France. It was a Morocco imagined, translated through language and love, a homeland lived by proxy.

When Sharaf finally journeyed to Morocco on her own, something shifted. The places she had once known only through someone else’s voice took on their own textures and rhythms. The country she had inherited became one she could finally encounter — and claim — for herself.

In this new chapter, photography became her compass. Through her lens, she explored what it means to belong to a country both familiar and foreign — a place that feels like memory, yet insists on being experienced anew. Each image she captures exists between two temporalities: the past she has absorbed and the present she is discovering.

Her camera is not a documentarian’s tool but a bridge — connecting her mother’s Morocco to her own. A courtyard bathed in late afternoon light, a fabric stirring in the desert wind, a child’s gaze meeting hers — these moments are the vocabulary of her personal reclamation.
They speak not of nostalgia but of renewal.