Mounir Raji

The Dutch-Moroccan photographer Mounir Raji makes everything seem serene, even an ice cream under the sun. In one of his latest shots, an ice-cream cone sits proudly on the deck of a cruise ship, its frosty cap spiralling up to the blue sky. Not a vanilla drip in sight. 

The cool cone is just one of several sedate sitters in Perfect Day. Mounir Raji Photographs Tourism, Raji’s current exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (ends 14 January 2024). The tranquility on view belies the show’s subject matter: tourism, that feverish arena of literal and metaphorical meltdowns. “I look for the calm,” Raji tells me in the museum’s cafeteria. This, he says, is his energy, his power source. “I think there’s calm in every situation, even in this chaos here with people having lunch. You can always find a moment of peace.” The series was commissioned as the latest edition of Document Nederland, the museum’s annual photography showcase. Tourism was chosen as the theme to celebrate the opening of borders – and the packing of bags – following the lockdowns of the pandemic. 

Raji won the Rijksmuseum commission in early 2023. “I love to work with light, and it was winter,” he recalls. So instead of photographing tourists at home, Raji chose the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba as a cruise muse. Joining an American liner as it toured the Caribbean, he snapped dialled-down sunseekers and the mechanisms required to provide the perfect holiday. Shooting digitally, rather than with analogue film, Raji brings humour and humanity to figures often denigrated, depicting holidaymakers, deckhands, waiters and pool boys with dignity. In a quiet pastel palette, he conjures up a closed floating world of pleasure, complete with sun hats, beach towels and cocktails. 

Raji was born in 1982 in Zaandam, a town on the northern edge of Amsterdam, to parents who had emigrated from Morocco in the 1960s. Raji’s father came to Holland to work and “build a better life for himself, and also for his family back home in Morocco”. Raji’s mother initially settled there with her first husband. As a child, Raji wasn’t particularly drawn to the visual arts. “I was playing football all the time and that was my focus,” he recalls. “To be honest, I didn’t like museums.” After studying at the FOTOfactory, a private photography school in Amsterdam, Raji won commercial assignments and exhibited in group presentations. In 2018, his pictures appeared in Splendour and Bliss – Arts of the Islamic World at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague. For the show, he produced a series of portraits of celebrated Dutch figures – musicians, writers, chefs – with Islamic backgrounds, along with still lifes of their favourite works from the exhibition. The assignment, he says, put his name into the museum sector and introduced him to ancient techniques of glass blowing, wood carving and calligraphy. “It was interesting to see so many art pieces from the Islamic world,” he recalls. “I wasn’t aware of the rich history.”

Raji’s panoramic series Dreamland, begun in 2017 and now the subject of his first photobook, explores less-obvious representations of Morocco. “Whenever I saw a photobook about Morocco, I didn’t recognise the country I knew,” he recalls. “That was one of the main reasons to start photographing Morocco.” Another reason was that he wanted to rediscover his joy of photography, having worked for several years on commissions for magazines, including Vogue and Elle, and fashion clients such Adidas and G-Star RAW. “I was working for commercial clients and therefore I missed my own voice,” he says. “I started to try and photograph from the heart. I realised that I was photographing Morocco as I knew it from my childhood memories. Every summer we went to Morocco for six weeks to visit family. Those memories created a positive feeling because everything is better on holiday.” That feeling emerges in photographs of boys diving into rivers, of fruit trees and elegant scarves, the silhouettes of palms. The title says it all, says Raji: “A pleasant, lovely land that exists only in dreams or the imagination.” Morocco became an idyll in his mind’s eye. “There is this feeling that we, as the kids of migrants, share. That of a certain longing.”

Raji’s series Yallah (2020) – which evolved from his Dreamland project and was presented at the 2021 edition of FotoFestival Naarden – retains a single, unlikely, viewpoint to cope with a personal tragedy. “I was in Morocco in 2019 shooting for Dreamland. My father died unexpectedly while he was on holiday there. During the mourning process a group of women came to give their condolences one day, and I escaped to the roof of my parents’ apartment. That’s when I saw the scooters.” On the street corner below, locals barrelled by on their mopeds and scooters – often three to a bike – along a runway of everyday activity.

Yallah – Arabic for “let’s go” – shows mothers shepherding their children to school, youths speeding to meet friends, shopping being taken home. The street markings form a kind of musical score, with the scooters as the notes. “I wanted to photograph the scooters for a long time, but I couldn’t find a good way to do it,” Raji notes. “It really felt like a gift at that time, since I was struggling. What I liked about this method is that I could really focus on the subject and isolate it to tell a bigger story.” The story is of life continuing. 

The larger narrative told in Perfect Day is of how great expectations are realised. A cruise ship, says Raji, is this “crazy thing” built entirely for tourism. Yet it provided a place where he could interact with the people seeking this idealised vacation. “On a cruise, you are there for eight days. I felt it was like school,” he admits. Next, he says, he would like to shoot a series on the Nile – its people, boats, tributaries – explaining that he is drawn to the importance of Egypt’s ancient river. One imagines, captured through Raji’s lens, they will be still waters.  

This profile first appeared in Canvas 110: It’s Electrifying