Salim El Khatib is a 29-year-old self-taught French-Moroccan photographer currently based in Marrakech. Born and raised in the suburbs of Paris, he grew up between two worlds — with Morocco as a deep emotional and cultural reference, and France as the space where his identity took shape. This dual heritage profoundly shapes his visual language.
Now living in Morocco, Salim explores the country with a perspective both intimate and distanced — that of someone connected by blood and memory, yet long removed in experience. His work reflects the unique position of a second-generation immigrant: an outsider who is not a stranger. Through this lens, he seeks to observe, question, and celebrate everyday Moroccan life, its beauty, tension, and poetry.
His journey into photography began in 2022 with a passion for analog film. Influenced by masters like Elliott Erwitt, he developed his practice through intuition, relentless curiosity, and a desire to slow down time. Favoring a spontaneous, meditative approach, Salim walks the streets with his camera, a few rolls of film, and music — open to moments of chance, emotion, and presence.
His images, mostly captured on color film, are fragments where light, setting, and feeling converge. Drawing inspiration from painting, architecture, and tattoo art, his work defies rigid rules and embraces the ordinary as a space for wonder. For Salim, photography is both a contemplative act and a way to bridge the fragments of his own identity. He invites viewers to see the familiar differently, to pause, observe and reconnect with the overlooked poetry of everyday life.
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This series offers an analog glimpse into Morocco’s street markets as stages of daily ritual. Moments like arranging crates, sharing a glance, or shading produce unfold in silent harmony, revealing the quiet poetry of the everyday.
Set in the stillness of the Agafay desert where time doesn’t move fast, it settles. The land becomes both canvas and witness.
Two coastal rhythms: the Atlantic shores of Essaouira, Morocco, and Las Palmas, Canary Islands, though separated by borders, these beaches share a common language of light, of stillness, of lives unfolding slowly.
A small focus on anonymous figures in transit: walking, ascending, drifting through spaces where light shifts and time softens.
At the heart of this work lies a question: What is progress, and for whom is it meant?
In today’s Morocco where luxury malls rise next to unfinished homes, where Instagram dictates aesthetics faster than tradition can adapt two worlds coexist.One follows a westernized path of performance and productivity, often adopting imported codes of success. The other holds onto local rhythms, inherited gestures, and a different relationship to time, to family, to silence.This series does not aim to glorify nor critique either world. It simply pauses in between, wondering: Is happiness found in aligning with society’s expectations or in shaping one’s own?
In Morocco, the beach is more than a landscape it’s a territory where bodies, generations, and rhythms converge. Where young lovers dream, where solitude is not loneliness but breathing room. The beach holds memory, movement, and a suspended form of freedom.
Thie quiet creation and contemplation
The souq is a living archive. A place where voices, colors, scents and textures have coexisted for centuries, evolving and repeating themselves in micro-variations.
Ode to slow life
In the early morning sun of Essaouira’s fishing port, wisdom is carried in the hands, in repetition, in gestures. These images preserve the warmth of a disappearing rhythm — one that resists the rush, embraces the tide, and listens more than it speaks.
The Ourika Valley is more than a landscape is a living archive of Amazigh heritage. Between olive trees and mountain stone, generations have cultivated memory from ancestral roots .This series pays tribute to a rhythm of life anchored in tradition, craftsmanship, and resilience.
“Exit signs” are meant to guide us but in these corridors of shadow and light, exit becomes a question. For decades, people have been told where to go. From countryside to city. From Africa to Europe. Entire generations moved under the pressure of survival, under the myth of “better elsewhere.” But something is shifting. Now, the children of those who left are returning. Their exit becomes an entrance. “Issue de Secours” it’s about reimagining where the way out leads and asking, what if the exit has always been a way home?
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Casablanca pulses with motion, engines roaring, light shifting by the minute. Yet its people remain grounded, embodying a quiet resistance to the speed around them.
Sleeping on rugs in the souk, guarding corners of stone, stretched across sunlit walls, they move like shadows.They are part of the landscape, part of the rhythm, spirits of the street.