Project Summary

Atlas is a proposal for a photography book—a hybrid publication between images and text—that will relate specifically to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. At the time of March Meeting 2011 the book had not been realised, however photographer Ahmad Hosni presented the concept driving his research. For many years he has been interested in places where tourism has developed to become the dominant socio-economic model, and where the meaning of a place can hinge on an image of its landscape or topographic features, like mountains. Hosni plans to use satellite imagery of the Atlas Mountains from Google Earth as a platform for his investigation. He will allow the website to direct his choice of locations from which to shoot photographs for Atlas, by picking out the points on the map that most users have interacted with, usually by uploading their own comments or photographs. Hosni used the occasion of March Meeting to also invite contributions to the project that use Google Earth as a context for creative work.

Presentation Proposal

Atlas is a book project featuring visual and textual work by a number of contributors. The project takes on ‘place’ as the subject matter of investigation as well as a context for the artistic act. The place is the Moroccan Atlas region and the project aims to achieve three goals:

1. Foster a crossover between social sciences (human geography) and humanities on the one hand, and the artistic process on the other.

2. Provide a reflection on tourism as a socio-spatial condition.

3. Foreground the artist book as the medium for collaborative artistic practice and the hybridization between the written word and the visual. This project is currently in its early phases and a list of contributors has not yet been finalised. The project will take place between December 2010 and May 2011 and is being implemented with the support of Dar Al-Mamûn Marrakech, Morocco.

Speaker

Ahmad Hosni (b. 1974, Cairo) studied medicine and worked as a doctor for three years before switching to photography. Since 2004 he has worked as a professional photographer for international publications and agencies, including The Times, Monocle, The Guardian, Panos Pictures, Die Zeit and Bidoun. Hosni’s work spans a variety of photographic fields and genres; the different genres blend to a point that makes his work hard to classify. Hosni adopts a cross-disciplinary approach: from social sciences and humanities to art and vice versa.

December 2011

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