You see donkeys pretty much everywhere in Morocco, usually with some extraordinarily large and ill-balanced load stretched across their shoulders. Often their owners are sceptical about photographers, particularly if you raise your camera before getting their blessing (and allowing them to shuffle out of the picture). There’s a really odd culture in Morocco of scepticism about photography; I’ve heard it said that it’s a Berber thing, but I’m not sure that it has any deep spiritual roots. It seems most obviously to be about power and pride on the one hand, and ignorance on the other. Ignorance, because you can often persuade people to let you take their picture by talking about what you’re doing, showing them pictures of other people you’ve photographed, and reassuring them that it’s not a one way street—I do this by giving them my card, and making sure to send copies to those who want them. But it’s also just about power. Sometimes I’m reminded of the time when Lu and I went for a walk with my brother in law, Dave, and his and Sian’s son Zach. As we stepped off the pavement onto the fields around the back of our old house in Westerfield, Zach shouted ‘No Auntie Lu that’s MY grass’. It’s a bit like that sometimes in Morocco, people just wave their hands angrily whenever your camera is pointed anywhere near anything they might want a say over—no matter how public it is. I do know there are ethical issues here, and I’m going to spend some time thinking them through properly one day, but basically I think that if you’re out in public then you don’t have an absolute property right over your own image, any more than you have a right to prevent other people recording your image in their memories. Light reflects off you, and hits someone else’s retina, or their CMOS sensor, and you have no more right over that light than anyone else does. It’s like claiming a right over the air that you exhale. When it comes to commercial uses, that’s a different matter I suppose—especially insofar as the person whose image you’re using to make money is thereby rendered less able to make money out of that image him or herself. Of course, life’s not all about rights, and I think it’s rude to take pictures of people without asking, so, in general, and unless we’re in an explicitly public place, I tend not to. But there’s a difference between being rude and being wrong. Being committed either to an aesthetic, or to capturing the ‘decisive moment’, means sometimes you’re going to be rude. But in most cases it’s easy enough to smooth things over with a smile, and a chat.

So, Donkeys. Lu and I had a refrain, last time we were in Morocco, ‘don’t touch my mule [ne touchez pas]’. I won’t go into the details of our travel sillinesses—they generally involve singing and bad rhymes, my poetry skills coming in especially handy there—but basically we caught a few Moroccan chaps angrily protesting our photographing or videoing donkeys last time we were here, and were especially curious to see the lie of the land this time. As it goes, mule-protectiveness has been less fierce this time round, and nobody’s turned us away yet. The donkeys sometimes complain of course, letting out this ridiculous bray, which starts with a prolonged wheeze. But you can’t be rude to a donkey, can you?