Editorz

When we recently visited Mourad Fedouache in his Berlin studio, the 2026 Martha Cooper Scholar had begun covering the white walls with photographs and collage. They did not yet form a finished sequence. Instead, they appeared in small groupings, sometimes joined by drawings, objects, dates, and handwritten marks—compact stories developing alongside a larger photographic project.

One grouping grew out of an inflamed tooth, bringing medication packaging, handwritten text, and his photograph of a bug on the studio window—a reference to Kafka—into a small, self-contained story. Elsewhere, Fedouache had drawn the outline of a house directly onto the wall. Inside it were photographs he had taken of his iPhone screen, showing people and places back in Morocco, including his mother.

“This is like a diary,” he said while showing us the wall.

On a table nearby, small photographic prints were being sorted into loose groups. They included demonstrations and public gatherings, individual portraits, street and transit scenes, family-run restaurants, and quieter observations made while moving through Berlin. In one image, a pigeon passed through the city with the same claim on his attention as anyone else. Fedouache moved among the prints, pointing out repeated gestures and possible connections while the sequence was still taking shape.

People remain at the center of his photography.

“I try, because I love people,” he told us. “For that, you will see my pictures—all my pictures, it’s with people.”

Born in Morocco in 2000, Fedouache is a self-taught photographer raised in Douar Chanti, a neighborhood of Sidi Yahya El Gharb, near Kénitra. He earned his baccalaureate in physical sciences and later enrolled at Ibn Tofail University to study Arabic law. His academic interests led him in a different direction from his law studies, and he opted to pursue a Master of Excellence in Screenwriting and Directing at the same university. His photographic education began in the market and streets of his hometown. He started taking pictures in 2017 while working as a vendor in the local market, where the customers, workers, children, and families around him became his first subjects. His earliest camera was a mobile phone.

“I worked in markets and with people,” he recalled of his childhood. “Every time I see people, I see the human.”

That sentence, delivered with his direct and unexpectedly frank sincerity, comes close to describing the animating spirit of the work. The people in his photographs are not illustrations of a social condition. They are individuals encountered while working, waiting, celebrating, playing, traveling, or simply passing through a day.

Fedouache first photographed Douar Chanti from within, as someone whose family and history were already part of the place. His pictures record its working life, traditions, children’s games, aspirations, humor, and difficulties without presenting the neighborhood as a spectacle of deprivation. In discussing his first solo exhibition, he said that he wanted viewers to understand that people who possess little and live may nevertheless be happy. Neither Fedouache nor Martha Cooper denies hardship; it is a dry-eyed reality in much of the work. But neither allows hardship to become the entire identity of the people pictured.

Fedouache’s work appeared in Sourtna, the inaugural group exhibition at Morocco’s National Photography Museum in Rabat in 2020. In late 2022, he won the photography competition Dream Artist, broadcast on Morocco’s 2M television channel. The program helped make possible his first solo exhibition, From Douar Shanty to New York, presented at the American Arts Center in Casablanca in the spring of 2023. The exhibition brought together photographs of the people, rituals, labor, play, pain, and dreams he had observed in his home community.

Now he is the second recipient of the Martha Cooper Scholarship for documentary photography, administered by Stiftung Berliner Leben within its Fresh A.I.R. artist-residency program. The 2026 scholarship runs from February through November and provides a Berlin living and working space, financial and production support, and time to develop a new photographic project. The theme for this second scholarship cycle is “Future Visions: Artistic Approaches to Peace.”

The Berlin work was still very much in formation during our visit. Fedouache had been photographing immigrant communities, marches, neighborhood businesses, public transportation, and encounters on the street. Some images were made with his camera and others with his phone. For him, the distinction matters less than remaining prepared.

“The good image, it comes to you,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you, ‘Oh, I’m here.’”

He described constantly looking at photography online and in films, sometimes without knowing the name of the person who made the image. “I need to eat photography in my mind,” he said. At home, he keeps a camera near him. On the street, the phone may be enough. The important thing is to remain alert to the picture before it disappears.

His mother’s presence in the studio extended beyond the photographs inside the hand-drawn house. She had sent him a large parcel from Morocco filled with familiar foods, each wrapped and labeled with his name. Part of the reason, he explained, was her concern that he might not find the same things in Berlin. Part of it was simply the impulse to send pieces of home along with them.

Fedouache served Moroccan tea and shared one of the foods from the parcel while showing us his photographs. The afternoon moved easily between the table and the walls, between Berlin and Morocco, and between pictures already made and ideas still being tested. The hospitality did not interrupt the studio visit. It was part of it.

One developing idea concerned immigrant families and the meaning of home. Fedouache was considering asking children to draw the houses or places their parents remembered in Morocco, Sudan, or other countries. He might then enlarge the drawings and use them as backgrounds for family portraits. He presented it as an idea rather than an established project, something that had come to him only recently as he considered what he could realistically develop during the residency.

“You know, on the first day I’m in Berlin, I’m just walking here, and I tell myself, ‘Mourad, you used to say to yourself, “I need a place, money, and photography, and you have this now. Do it.’”

The idea of a child drawing a remembered or inherited home also suggests one of the strongest connections between Fedouache and the photographer whose name the scholarship carries.

These photographs became the basis of Cooper’s book Street Play. They also reveal something fundamental about her way of working. She paid attention to the intelligence of street life and to cultural practices that adults, institutions, and the news media frequently ignored. The same curiosity guided her later documentation of graffiti writers: look closely, learn how a community understands itself, and do not assume that an outsider’s first interpretation is correct.

During the visit, we looked at one of Fedouache’s photographs of a child playing with a handmade toy in Douar Chanti. It recalled Martha Cooper’s long-running interest in the games children invent from available materials. During decades of international travel, Cooper photographed children turning tires, bottles, scrap wood, wheels, and other discarded objects into toys. When she later examined photographs made in different countries, she noticed children separated by geography and culture improvising many of the same games.

Fedouache immediately recognized himself in the comparison.

“Because when I was a child, I did this,” he said. “I did this with my mom.”

The resemblance between the two photographers is not primarily visual. Cooper’s photographs are often direct, systematic records of people, actions, and environments. Fedouache’s work can be more diaristic, allowing his own memories, physical experiences, and visual associations to enter the developing sequence. Yet both are drawn to the ingenuity of ordinary people and to the unofficial ways they use streets, buildings, objects, and public space.

Cooper frequently entered communities as an attentive visitor who gradually earned access. Fedouache began by photographing the community from which he came. In Berlin, he is learning how to carry that closeness into places where he is the newcomer. His photographs suggest that he does so by spending time, speaking with people, returning, and allowing an encounter to become more than a picture taken in passing.

He described photography as a box with one eye. You turn it toward the world, he said, and decide how you will see what is there: beautiful or difficult, intimate or distant. Somewhat comically, he demonstrated the idea by putting a box over his head.

For now, the Berlin photographs remain spread across tables and gathered on the studio walls. A repeated hand may become a sequence. A photograph from a family restaurant may find its place beside an image from a march. Pictures of his mother and Morocco sit within the outline of a house while another idea about home develops nearby.

The final form will emerge later, during his exhibition for the program. What is already present is the consistency of Fedouache’s attention: a willingness to remain close to people, to recognize invention alongside hardship, and to keep looking until daily life begins to tell its own story.