Photographer and designer · Morocco
Hassan Hajjaj
Hassan Hajjaj (born 1961) is a Moroccan photographer, designer and artist who lives between London and Marrakech. His bright, patterned portraits of friends, musicians and the women bikers he calls the Kesh Angels, framed with cans, tins and boxes of everyday Moroccan goods, mix street style, fashion and pop art.
Updated 2 min read
Hassan Hajjaj was born in 1961 in Larache, on Morocco's Atlantic coast, and moved to London with his family as a boy, in 1973 aged twelve according to one profile, though another gives 1975. He grew up between the two cultures, worked in the city's club, music and street-fashion scenes, and began to photograph in Morocco in the 1990s, partly in response to the way Western fashion magazines used the country as an exotic backdrop.
His portraits turn that around. Sitters — friends, musicians, performers and people he meets in Marrakech — pose in clothes he designs from cheap printed fabrics, fake-logo textiles and traditional dress, against equally loud patterns. The prints are set in frames he builds from repeated tins of tomatoes, sardines, soft-drink cans or matchboxes. His best-known series, Kesh Angels, shows veiled women of Marrakech on their motorbikes.
The playfulness has earned him the nickname "the Andy Warhol of Marrakech", but the work is also about identity, migration and who gets to define how North Africans look.
How to look at a Hajjaj: take in the whole frame, and then separate its parts. The sitter, the clothes, the background pattern and the frame of tins are each loud, and the picture works by letting them clash; the cans and boxes are the brands that Moroccans buy every day, turned into a border of honour. That reading is this site's own.
One profile lists his work at the V&A in 2005, LACMA in 2013 and 2015 and the British Museum in 2016, and the series My Rock Stars was shown at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2016. La Caravane opened at Somerset House in London on 5 October 2017, and Andy Wahloo (2019) was shown at MACAAL in Marrakech.
Where to see the work
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston are named among the collections that hold his work, and the Nasher Museum of Art and the Newark Museum are also listed; ask each what is on view. See also Leila Alaoui, Yto Barrada and our lists of Moroccan photographers and African photographers.
