The photographer Leila Alaoui has died aged 33 of a heart attack after being shot in terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Alaoui was in Ouagadougou to work on a photography project for a women’s rights campaign called My Body My Rights for Amnesty International.
Her work appeared in publications including the New York Times and Vogue, and her photographs have been widely exhibited. She was probably best known for a series of portraits of Moroccan people, shown recently in Paris at the Biennial of Contemporary Arab World Photography. “It’s work I began in 2010 but it’s ongoing,” she told me in an interview in November. “Moroccans have the most complicated relationship to photography among Arabs because they are very apprehensive due to superstition. They are also tired of tourism, so there is a sort of rejection of the camera. My hope was to show traditional Moroccans without the folklore.”
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