The big picture: revolution in the air

The American photographer and folk musician John Cohen was 23 when, in 1955, the idea first formed in his head to go to Morocco. Cohen subsequently became famous as the first chronicler of the young Bob Dylan, and was a friend to Jack Kerouac, but his desire to visit north Africa was more a whim than any beatnik pilgrimage. “That was my first trip out, my first adventure,” he noted before his death last year. “I went to the New York phone book, because I thought maybe I needed a visa.”

There was no embassy listed, just a “Moroccan office of information”. That proved to be an upstairs apartment in the borough of Queens. There, Cohen found a man who explained how he was lobbying the UN for Moroccan independence. He wrote Cohen a note in Arabic with instructions to present it to a ship’s chandler, who worked on the docks in Tangier. “He’ll send you on to the others.” Cohen thought: “The others?”

This was the beginning of a journey around the country right at the moment that it was breaking free of French colonial rule. “The others” turned out to be key figures in the Moroccan independence party, Istiqlal, including Mehdi Ben Barka, one of its leaders. At the time, even as he travelled through Berber villages and the medinas of Rabat and Fez, Cohen confessed he was barely aware of this charged politics. His photographs from that trip are published for the first time in a new book, Look Up to the Moon, along with diary entries. In some of the pictures, Cohen almost inadvertently captured the rise of revolutionary tension in the contrast between images of French troops in ancient squares and the furtive bustle of his revolutionary guides in shadowy back alleys. More often, as here, you sense his preoccupation with his principal quest, “a sensual response to the light that had inspired Matisse”.

John Cohen: Look up to the Moon is published by Steidl (€38)