Cover image: Photo by Peter Ydeen “Chicken inside”, from the “Waiting for Palms” series.
“Waiting for Palms” is a series of photos which reflect the elegant but private urban landscapes of Morocco and Egypt. Shot in 2016 and 2017 from Essaouira to the Tafilalet area, to Fez in Morocco and from Cairo to Aswan in Egypt; the images capture a timeless world with subtle color, striking light, delicate geometries and a reflective people. It is a photo essay intending to show the warmth and gentleness of an often mysterious region. I spoke with author Peter Ydeen to show his artistic process and discover the photographic narration in each constellation of stories.
After studies, Ydeen made his way in a variety of jobs, including set construction, lighting, illustrations, advertising, film, stage, architectural modeling working in architecture that this year were showed at International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia at “Acros Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall” exhibition of Emilio Ambasz architect.
Over the last several years Peter has concentrated on photography where he is able to use the many years spent learning to see. We had a previous interview, but speaking with him is always a germinal ferment.
In December at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi he will have his second solo show in the capital, focus on “Waiting for Palms”.
What does photography mean to you? Why do you take photos?
Having come from a painting and sculpture background, I have found photography to be unique among the visual arts in its capacity to continually teach, partly because its foundation lies outside the artist rather than originating entirely within. Each photograph begins as what too many people call the “capture,” yet this initial moment is not static but is a seed that continues to reveal new insights, even to its creator, over time. An image that I have selected, cropped, and presented is experienced and translated differently by each viewer in ways that hold equal validity to my own intent. This transforms photography into a type of dialogue, a truly shared experience between creator and observer. So to answer the question, being quiet, private, and even somewhat reclusive (much like many of the people in Waiting for Palms), my photography is my own immersive form of social conversation, a way of sharing what touches me and talking with images to whoever might listen.
From the “Waiting for Palms” Series by Peter Ydeen: Figure 1, “Cat Theater”; Figure 2, “Chicken Inside”; Figure 3, “Leather Dyers”.
How did the “Waiting for Palms” series start? Why did you choose these geographic areas—such as Fez in Morocco or Cairo to Aswan in Egypt?
The initial journey for the series unfolded entirely without preconception. My wife and I had purchased tickets to India, but the day before departure we discovered our visas wouldn’t work. We thumbed through available flights, found good options to Morocco, booked two nights in a Marrakech hotel, and departed the following day with nothing further planned.
On the train from the airport, we met a local man who became our driver who, with a bit of cajoling, became adept at working with us and following our interests rather than imposing a typical agenda. Having a local driver allowed us to witness more of the typical daily landscape, and he quickly understood what we sought. Most of our time was spent in the rural areas with the exceptions being Marrakech and Fez. The Egyptian journey came together more intentionally, yet followed the same methods.
We had been so moved by Morocco that we wished to explore another area of North Africa. Egypt’s accessibility proved far more limited, its transportation following the normal tourist routes along the Nile. We traveled between cities by train, but in each place we again found a local driver, allowing us to spider outward from the nodes and encounter more of the villages and rural environments, with our bases being Cairo, Luxor and Aswan.
In what way has your intellectual curiosity fueled and shaped the series?
The photographs for Waiting for Palms were shot in the middle of creating my series Easton Nights and because the night series was my main focus, many of the photographs remained unprocessed until much later, with some still unprocessed even to this day. In developing the series, two things occurred that shifted my perspective, helping me shape and create a presentation for the photographs.
First, in having to write about the series for upcoming exhibits, I confronted the fact that I knew very little about the places I had photographed, which was the impetus for an intellectual exploration of why I photograph. Second, I entered what I believed was a portfolio competition for AAP Magazine, but mistakenly submitted to their travel competition instead—for which I received a 1st place award. Whereas I had always conceived of my work as urban landscape photography, the award pointed out that this part of my work was actually part of a travel photography genre structured around the urban landscape. Recognizing it as travel photography freed me from the obligation I had felt to explain the work in the same terms as an expert such as an anthropologist or historian and allowed me to concentrate on my impressions and reactions with an emphasis on looking and seeing.
The need to present the series, both in writing and in talks, initiated the fascinating engagement with exploring critics’ and writers’ thoughts on photography and translation and putting into words my own approach to what I do. There was a linear progression. First came Deborah Kapchan’s introduction to Poetic Justice, where her thoughts on the translation of Moroccan poetry paralleled my own translation of images. Then Edward Said, whose Orientalism helped educate me about and allowed me to avoid the tropes of analyzing these North African cultures. Then Susan Sontag, whose criticism of the problems of photographic translation relieved the constant burden of needing to define what I photographed. And finally, Gaston Bachelard, whose writings mirrored my own ideas that the photographer’s image is only the beginning, inviting each viewer to engage with and experience each capture with invention and imagination on their own terms—a thought that complemented the realization that these often unprocessed photographs, taken nearly a decade ago, remain forever fresh.
From the “Waiting for Palms” series by Peter Ydeen: Figure 1″Purple bag”; Figure 2, “Parked Boat on the Nile”; Figure 3, “Paradise”; Figure 4, “Home from School”.
The series features breathtaking landscapes interspersed with depictions of historic architecture and residential buildings, urban and desert life, and striking, poetic shots of children and women with their children. Was it landscape or portraiture that inspired you to tell the story of these lands?
Waiting for Palms stands as the only series I have created that consistently includes people—though all of my urban landscapes ultimately are about people, told through their built environments. In this series, the people appear most often diminutive in scale, depicted as parts of the landscape, and while I reduce the people to an element of the landscape, I also elevate the environment to the status of the people. Still, it is unique among my different series in that the people do function as working parts of a scene, such as the children coming home from school, where it is by no means portraiture, but still the playful grouping of children plays well against the old stone buildings and rocky landscape, becoming a single coherent thought. Toy Story is a similar photograph from Aswan where the two traditionally clothed women are not portraits, but play a strong back and forth with the modern plastic toys in the shops, creating a singular statement of how tradition interplays with modernity.
Peter Ydeen: Marrakesh Color Explosion”.
The central theme explores how landscapes reflect the gestalt of the communities that inhabit them. Can you elaborate?
This remains the common thread through almost all of my different series and is well studied by those who analyze the urban environment. It finds particular importance in Waiting for Palms because of the often private nature of the people who inhabit these places who, despite their seeming introspection, are defined by their world exploding with life and character around them.
There exists, however, an important dichotomy in how this subject is approached. Some scholars, such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said, examine how societal power is reflected in the built environment—that is, how architecture enforces hierarchies, embodies colonial domination, or serves as a tool of control. To me this is a decidedly negative view and not addressed in my development of the series.
In contrast, and more aligned with my own approach to this subject, thinkers like Gaston Bachelard in “The Poetics of Space” view built environments as expressions of human imagination, memory, and intimate experience—a beautiful thought. Similarly, architects such as Christopher Alexander and urbanists like Jane Jacobs emphasize how spaces emerge from human creativity, needs, and organic social patterns rather than from the cold, top-down impositions of power.
As for myself, I have always felt that the true subject of my photography is the “spirit of place,” which concerns itself less with social structure and more with the positive gestalt that develops naturally emanating from people’s needs, wishes, imagination, and dreams. And this gestalt of place is the central theme of Waiting for Palms.
Peter Ydeen: “A mother, a Baby and a Tree”.
There are three iconic and significant pieces in this series: “A Mother, a Baby and a Tree”, “Waiting for Palms”—the title photograph—and “Exhale”, representing the Egyptian side of the series which are all the most exhibited and published pieces. Can you introduce them?
While A Mother, a Baby and a Tree and Exhale found their way to represent the series by popular selection, the photograph Waiting for Palms proves significant for its easily identifiable and literal association with the thesis of the whole series—how the environment reflects the people, and how their inner life manifests itself upon the outer world. I am guessing as to why the first two are singled out, but A Mother, a Baby and a Tree, which is continually selected by curators and editors to represent the series, I believe is chosen because of its simple composition and serene sense of a place which is foreign to us in the West. Exhale was a very lucky moment to capture, as the children’s thoughts seem so adeptly revealed by the Disney blanket rolling out of the window, and the setting of a dilapidated Cairo facade frames them so naturally. To look at it, you seem to know what they want so explicitly. With Waiting for Palms, you could almost put a caption bubble around the mural of palms and attribute it to the woman, fully clothed in black standing nearby. As the series ages, and groups of images from the series are presented for various reasons, these three seem to always be part of curators’ final selection.
Peter Ydeen: “Exhale”
In your book “Waiting for Palms”, your work contains portraits of places that convey the identity of two countries. How do you identify projects and places that you consider interesting for your work?
I am not a conceptual artist, and in fact preconceptions have always stood as obstacles for me. Most of my series begin to develop out of nonspecific photography, in the places I live or commute to, or the places my wife and I travel, all with no particular concept in mind. Frank Gohlke once said the last person to ask about an artist’s work is the artist himself, because artists simply do it. This is borne out with this series, where many years later, I am giving new life to old photos as if they had been in a shoebox in the closet, where the story emerges from the images in a second life. The purpose of our many travels has never been to photograph, but instead the photographs are a reflection of the way I look and see, my “biography” as Adams would put it. What I choose to see, crop, select, and then present, which then begins a new life in the many translations of others.
Camilla Boemio, contributor writer at The Dreaming Machine, covers the latest contemporary art, photography and culture news — from museums to biennials — as well as artists conversations. One of her recent publications is “The Edge of Equilibrium” published by Vanilla Edizioni. Her recent exhibition curated is Ron Laboray solo show “Time and Random Data in Sequence” at De Bouwput in Amsterdam. Her interests include tracking activism for climate change, environmental sustainable living and every shade of green.
