{"id":121272,"date":"2023-04-05T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-05T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/?p=121272"},"modified":"2023-04-05T15:49:04","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T13:49:04","slug":"hassan-hajjaj","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/hassan-hajjaj\/","title":{"rendered":"Shooting to the beat with Hassan Hajjaj"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cIt becomes like a dance\u201d <\/em>explains Hassan Hajjaj\u00a0 when we speak to him from Marrakech about his joyful portraits of everyone from Lee Scratch Perry<\/a> to Cardi B<\/a>. The Moroccan Londoner\u2019s practice traverses photography, fashion and film, and with his art in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech & the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, he was hard at work on the next volume of his My Rockstars <\/em>series when he jumped on a call to speak about his process through the prism of music and musicians.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1961 in the fishing town of Larache in the Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima region of northwestern Morocco, Hassan recalls growing up with a multitude of music, the most popular being: \u201cWhat we call Chaabi, the local music\u201d <\/em>going on to enthuse, \u201cBut then you had Gnawa music, we had Umm Kulthum and all the music from Egypt, all his very local specific music from Morocco like Rhaitamusic – which is like a flute but not a flute! As well as Berber music and finally Indian music – As the only movies we wanted to see back then were Indian films so in the market we\u2019d get cassettes of Indian music.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Complimenting these sounds: \u201cWe could get the radio from Spain\u201d<\/em> remembers Hassan \u201cas it was only 13 km away so you had this Spanish and Latin music and as it was the mid 60s 70s and there was a lot of rock music like Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

His first encounter with portrait photography came as a sitter when his mother took Hassan and his siblings to have a photo taken to send to their father who had gone ahead to London to look for work. Hassan recalls vividly the props of the photographer including a cowboy costume and plastic horse. It wasn\u2019t until 1973 that the family joined his father in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lee Scratch Perry, framed photography by Hassan Hajjaj, 2019\/1440
Courtesy of Lee Scratch Perry and the Artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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London was a different place in the seventies, Hassan reminds me, \u201cWhen I arrived in England I was Moroccan and I didn’t speak English. It was a foreign land, and it was a few years before I adjusted.\u201d <\/em>\u00a0On leaving school he got involved in organizing parties and as: \u201cgrowing up most of my friends were from the Caribbean I got into soul music and then reggae as it was an up and coming music and I became a big reggae head<\/em> “. Hassan\u2019s role was to scout and dress venues for these parties which he did for about fifteen years in parallel with clubs, deejaying, and opening a clothing shop named R.A.P (Real Artistic People) in London\u2019s Covent Garden. During this time he took photos of his friends but an epiphany came on a trip back to Morocco when he observed Elle Magazine using a friend\u2019s Riad as an exotic backdrop. It was then he realized he wanted to use photography to showcase and celebrate his culture and the pan-Africanism of multicultural London.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hassan started documenting musician friends living in or passing through London against backdrops he made using everyday objects ubiquitous across Africa such as cheap plastic mats and colorful CocaCola crates for his subjects to sit and pose on. Designing suits cut from African wax print, or upcycled from found materials, Hassan began reclaiming the idea of a `rock star\u2019 and elevating the clash of color and counterfeit goods found in the medinas of Marrakech or London\u2019s Camden Market, to high fashion. Completing these portraits are frames (so often an afterthought for artists and galleries) composed of tins of olives, sardines, or harissa in vibrant colors and Arabic script.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shooting his subjects on the street in front of his shop in Shoreditch East London, Hassan explains how music accompanies the process. Music, which: \u201cIf it’s not live, I will have on my Bose speaker\u201d <\/em>continuing \u201cI always try to have live music for the shoots because it becomes like a performance. The sitter is performing, I\u2019m performing and I\u2019m shooting to the beat. When I was shooting on film I\u2019d always shoot with a click so I\u2019d get into a rhythm with a person, with the musician, or the music, and it becomes like a dance. So that\u2019s become part of it without realizing. It wasn\u2019t anything that I planned, it just happened regularly and now it\u2019s almost expected!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days Hassan still shoots on the street in Shoreditch but he is just as likely to be shooting for The New Yorker<\/strong> as he did for Cardi B back in 2017. \u201cI got this call from New Yorker Magazine to shoot this girl called Cardi B for the cover and at that time I didn’t know she was. So I Googled her and then I realized I\u2019ve seen her on TV.\u201d <\/em>Or at the annual fashion and music festival Sole DXB in Dubai<\/a> where he shot Lee Scratch Perry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rachid Taha, framed photography by Hassan Hajjaj, 2011\/1432
Courtesy of Rachid Taha and the Artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A dream come true for Hajjaj who has been a fan of Perry\u2019s since his Black Arc days, the shoot unfolded over two days, Hassan recounts: \u201cThe great thing is he came for the first day and I shot him mainly in his own clothes. He stayed behind a bit and saw I was shooting other people and he was a bit quiet, just watching and observing. Then the next day I got a call from his team saying: `Listen, he loved it! Can he come back and do a shoot with your clothes?\u2019 And I said, ‘Definitely!\u2019 So he came back and we spent the whole day!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another hero of Hassan\u2019s is Rachid Taha who was already a friend when he proposed to photograph the late Algerian star in Paris on location with friend and restaurateur Mourad Mazouz,<\/strong> better know as \u201cMommo\u201d.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s Rachid Taha on the stage – the rockstar, and then there\u2019s Rachid Taha the sensitive person, and I really honed in on that\u201d <\/em>explains Hassan,remembering: \u201cI really got on with him, we didn\u2019t have to speak. He was doing something from our culture, I was doing photography, and Momo was doing food so it was this nice triangle of three North Africans doing their own thing. I wasn\u2019t sure if he was going to turn up, if he was going to come late? But when I arrived there he was already there an hour before. We had a really nice day. I shot him, we had lunch, we carried on shooting, and we stayed there until 1 in the morning!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the almost seven hundred `Rock Stars\u2019 Hassan has shot, the pictures of Taha, Perry and others form a body of work with each \u201clike a musical note so that if you put loads of them together it becomes like a song”.<\/em> \u201cMusic for me is the rhythm that gives my art a spirit, and the rhythm in my pictures\u201d <\/em>Hassan sums up before signing off a chat as warm and big hearted as his portraits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photographer Hassan Hajjaj brings his North African culture to life with technicolor shots including everyday objects from olive tins to counterfeit goods, using a musical lens to illuminate today\u2019s biggest stars.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":121310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11036,7833],"tags":[5960],"location":[8136],"yst_prominent_words":[8511,8932,8938,8407,8414,8447,8613,8542,9365,8402,8543,8619],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121272"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=121272"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=121272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}