Sometimes called the “Andy Warhol of Marrakesh”, Hassan Hajjaj is a Moroccan contemporary photographer who spent much of his youth living in London, which influenced the almost hip-hop style in his artwork. He mixes Moroccan vibrant colours and heritage with modern street style clothing and poses to create a more current portrayal of Morocco than is often seen in the media.
His images are bright and vibrant, but even more so they take people’s personalities to another level, almost making them caricatures of themselves or works of art.
He uses the pop-art tradition of using everyday objects in artwork by photographing cans of Moroccan food and duplicating them until they create a digital frame around the portrait of the person, using colours that enhance the colour scheme of the image, either by using the colour wheel and using contrasting colours or by using the same ones.
His subjects all wear bright clothes and clashing patterns, which helps to modernise the image of Morocco and Northern Africa that the Western world often has of a third-world country suffering from oppression to a flourishing country with its own rich cultural history.
Hajjaj’s images are characterised by their distinctive bright colours, and he makes very good use of the colour wheel, specifically contrasting colours such as purple and yellow, and blue and orange. This scheme helps his images to stand out and allows the subject to remain the main focal point of the picture.