At the Marriage Festival
Morocco 1998 Imilchil, a village in the High Atlas Mountains
Every fall, there is a marriage festival in Imilchil. It’s sort of a Sadie Hawkins Day affair; women of the Ait Haddou tribe can ask men to marry them. Normally the women who are looking for a husband are widows. Young girls are easy to marry off. They are prized by both old and young men and their parents have no problem finding a husband for them.
Most times the couples know each other and have discussed marriage and agreed that they want to be married. The ceremony takes place in a large tent where only men are present to sign the contract. No women attend. The guardian of the woman signs for her. This could be her father, brother or other relative. After the contract is signed, all of the newly married couples go up on a stage and stand together for all to see. Maybe this gives heart to those who failed to find someone. There is always next year.
The women of the Ait Haddou tribe wear a distinctive cloak with a hood that is tied with a small strip of fabric. The wool of the cloak is a deep blue with a red stripe. The young women of the tribe color large red circles on their cheeks with cochineal, rather like the face on a doll or a puppet. They outline their eyes heavily with kohl. It’s cute.
It was hard to get a shot of the faces of the young women. If they saw me point the camera in their direction, they’d duck their head. They are mountain people and notoriously shy.
I extracted these women from the background because it was too cluttered and I had too small an aperture. To blur out the background, you need to use your widest aperture. There’s a lot to think about when you’re shooting like this, does the background add to the story? Is my subject moving? do I need a faster shutter speed? or a higher ISO? One rule is to set your aperture to its widest and to set your ISO to 400 or as high as necessary. So, you get noise, so what?