Monday morning coffee in Marrakech

Writing a review of Alf Kumalo’s photobook, Through my Lens, an uneven collection of historical photographs, it suddenly struck me. Tenses matter in photography. Photography, it would seem to me, is about a perennial past tense. It can never articulate a future tense, and only tenuously claim to speak of a present tense. Thinking this, I found myself wondering to what extent photography is, unavoidably, about denying death. Death exists in the perpetual future tense – it will happen, until it does happen. It’s a muddled thought, admittedly. Needs refinement.

Incidentally, I write this while sitting in a riad in Marrakech. My visit here prompted a colleague to send me a note about Paul Bowles: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

 To extend on Bowles, how many times will I get to sip the dark coffee served by shy cook in a Marrakechi riad on a Monday morning? Not many. I’m going to enjoy the limitless finality of this morning’s coffee.