John Cohen found a country looking to break free of colonial rule in his light-filled image of Morocco in the 50s
The American photographer and folk musician John Cohen was 23 when, in 1955, the idea first formed in his head to go to Morocco. Cohen subsequently became famous as the first chronicler of the young Bob Dylan, and was a friend to Jack Kerouac, but his desire to visit north Africa was more a whim than any beatnik pilgrimage. “That was my first trip out, my first adventure,” he noted before his death last year. “I went to the New York phone book, because I thought maybe I needed a visa.”
There was no embassy listed, just a “Moroccan office of information”. That proved to be an upstairs apartment in the borough of Queens. There, Cohen found a man who explained how he was lobbying the UN for Moroccan independence. He wrote Cohen a note in Arabic with instructions to present it to a ship’s chandler, who worked on the docks in Tangier. “He’ll send you on to the others.” Cohen thought: “The others?”
