Ouarzazate

This series of large format photographs were taken around the town of  Ouarzazate, Morocco in 2010, where the film industry has created a bizarre landscape through use of the area for film sets. 

Today, the remnants of these productions can be seen scattered about the lonely barren landscape, creating jarring fictitious historical sites out of crumbling plaster and wooden scaffolding. Here seeing is not believing. Relationships with reality become fractured; parallel universes are created that have their own histories, both in their celluloid re-interpretation, and in the existence of these physical sets. A model of Mecca is situated less than a mile from a set of Bethlehem and in another location lies a broken down American petrol station, a large set from The Hills Have Eyes. Ouarzazate becomes a place where where many times, places and narratives converge producing a confused sense of place and past and where representations can gain their own historical reality. 

Ouarzazate, 2011. Digital C-type prints mounted on dibond in various sizes.