"It is no coincidence that Jean-Christophe Ballot, an architect by training who devotes most of his work to the urban landscape, gives us pictures of the city that invite reflection and make us feel the fascination it exerts on those who question its future and its memory. From the outset he invites us to approach it by its seafront, through its landscape of jetties, basins and quays, where the Portuguese conquerors landed and gave it, in the fifteenth century, its name of Casa Branca. It is also the sea that raises over the city the stifling mists that drown its outlines and stretch the clouds of its horizon between sky and earth, as if to remind us that the city is its own, that it is the sea that gave rise to it and shaped it from the port. The port, the nerve centre of the city, is where the photographer captures serene, static, pure images, all taken frontally. Cranes, silos and ship hulls are treated here as so many artefacts of modernity. Facing the port, the old medina resists with its dazzlingly white houses, built on a human scale and now threatened with crumbling." Brahim Alaoui