Based in Paris, photographer Ilyes Griyeb was born in Meknes, Morocco, where he found his passion for photography.
About ‘Moroccan youth’:
We all have our America. It can come from a white screen, from a big idolized brother, or from an uncle of the same name, who succeeds on the other side of a chimerical sea. We could give ourselves the means to make it exist, but we often prefer the idea. Why come out of his bubble for the disillusion of the West when you are so good cowboy of his own Far West? Khalid’s America is one of the consequences of emigration for those who have not had the opportunity to leave. It is this distorted view of life that those who return for the holidays return to him. 4×4 gleaming, villas with endless pools, they behave as settlers for a summer. Khalid is then theirs. The difference is that he stays at the end.
His America is the life he feels should be his. She is adorned with checkered monograms, roars with all her horses and seduces the gazelles. The other life is too slow. Enlisée in its sands, it does not crack as on MTV. It is the work, the reality of a world where we are cruelly what we have. Unfortunately, millions do not grow where goats graze. What is left to forget him? a bit of firecracker and daring to never get out of adolescence where everything seemed possible? In the eyes of others, the fathers, the elders, are the symptoms of an illness. “And they do not know that’s all we have for us – to represent us, that they do not know that. Said Oxmo Puccino. Those who judge him will never be able to understand it: they have not been confronted with the same dreams.
