“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

- Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

*

The heat of the sun that shines down on Jackson is scorching, swirling a droplet of sweat from his forehead to his chin before it falls to the ground. In Morocco, the sun looks different: a ball of burnt orange suspended above the beige desert underneath, its warmth ballooning the thick air around Jackson until it presses down at him, suffocating. He stands underneath a terracotta archway leading to the town square, his linen shirt swaying in the wind. The sand underneath his feet crackles as Jackson moves his sandals, the sound the only thing he hears, crisp and clear. His camera is in his hands (but really, when isn’t it?) and Jackson bends his back in order to get a clearer shot of what’s in front of him: a withered ivory fountain that’s been dry for as long as he’d been here. One that, as villagers told him, would remain dry for the rest of the summer. The man had laughed at him as he had explained this, mocking Jackson for his naivety, though it had not been with malice.

(‘You foreigners all think Morocco is best in the summer. Come back in shata! That’s when you take picture.’

‘I’m going to Norway in the winter’, Jackson had replied. The man had only smiled.)

By the right side of the cracked column of the fountain lies scattered fruit, its colours vibrant against the dull sand. A cluster of bananas, growing brown and unwanted; purple and green grapes that had stumbled off a market cart in the afternoon and had been forgotten; the peel of a dragon fruit, its skin bright pink, nearly fluorescent.

Just an hour before the square had still been bustling with people: men and women in long robes the colour of moss and pomegranates rummaging their hands through turmeric and saffron, children with dark hair and dark skin running after small white dogs wagging their tails, a group of greying men sitting on wooden stools in front of a riad, the tea hidden in their golden teacups sickingly sweet. Now, the place breathes silence – relief. Only Jackson is here to witness the square in its true form, for him to see. He takes the snap. When he moves his head away from the camera, he has to blink away the black spots that appear in his vision. The sun is too powerful, too blinding at this time of the day, and so Jackson concludes he has done enough anyway. Now it’s time to return to his hotel on the other part of town. As another droplet of sweat rolls its way down his back, he hides his camera away.

An hour later, when his body has been thoroughly shaken by the rocking of the ramshackle bus, Jackson finds himself locked in his dark room (or rather, his hotel bathroom, to which he had assigned a new function). He has a couple of towels shoved under the door to block out any light, a red lightbulb dangling above his head fastened to the showerhead with some wire. The stinging smell of photo chemicals reaches his nose as he bathes a print in the water basin, sliding the picture through the water. He holds the print up by its corner, letting the liquid slowly drip off the picture before hanging it with the others: a collection of pictures tightened onto a line of robe by white and pink clothespins. It’s been a while now; the images on the first prints are starting to appear. Excited, Jackson takes the first one in his hands.

This was one of the pictures he had taken on his first day in Morocco, when he was still in Casablanca. Its landscape is that of one of the greener areas Jackson had managed to find. In the far left corner of the picture, a slim argan tree twirls up from the ground into the sky, its slender trunks dangling in the air as elegantly as the hands of a prima ballerina in first position. Behind it is a historical Moroccan building. Its yellow bricks glisten golden in the sun; its mighty archway breathe power and conduct. When the viewer looks inside the archway, he finds a slight fata morgana, winking at them from inside the courtyard, drawing them closer. On the side of the right wall, ivy is flirting its way up, wanting to kiss the sun above. All of this, Jackson had noticed when he had taken the picture. But what he hadn’t seen was the figure of a person hidden just by the mighty trunk of the tree. Now, with the picture enlarged, Jackson can tell it’s a man, leaning against the argan. Probably looking for some shade, he muses, as he recalls how hot it had been that day. The man looks tall and slender (a bit like the tree itself, his mind adds absentmindedly) and the expression on his face is pensive. His nose is sharp and his hair is short, combed to the side or swept that way by the tender wind. If he had turned just a bit more, he would be facing the camera; but alas, now his position is between a side-profile and his back, as if the man were in the process of walking away from Jackson.

In his darkroom, Jackson groans. The picture would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for the man. Jackson didn’t do portraits, or any type of picture of a person for that matter, at least not since a disastrous attempt at college. He deliberates tearing the image apart – as he usually does with failed work – but for some reason, his hands falter. His body stills, staring at the picture in his hands. After a second or two he puts it aside, his gloved hands carefully wrapping it in plastic. It’s a nice picture nonetheless, Jackson decides as he moves on to the next one, and that’s the last he thinks of it for some time.