Three Moroccan photographers—Issam Chorrib, Haitham Nsais and El Mehdi Kharbouch—have been recognised among the winners of the Tasweer Awards 2026, announced on World Photography Day by Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar.
Their recognition forms part of a wider selection of 30 photographers whose works were chosen for the 2026 Tasweer Project Award and Tasweer Single Image Award. Together, the winning projects reflect the breadth of contemporary photographic practice across Western Asia and North Africa, addressing questions of labour, memory, identity, place, community and social change.
For Morocco, the three selections are particularly notable for the distinct ways they approach everyday life. Chorrib turns his camera towards boxing communities in Casablanca’s Sidi Moumen and Lahraouyine neighbourhoods; Nsais looks inward at the industrial environment and workers he knew through his own employment; while Kharbouch uses an old family photograph and a contemporary landscape to examine disappearance and memory.
Issam Chorrib: documenting the quiet resilience of boxing communities
Casablanca-based documentary photographer Issam Chorrib received a Tasweer Project Award for A Pair of Gloves, a long-term photographic project centred on male and female boxers in the neighbourhoods of Sidi Moumen and Lahraouyine.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the spectacle of boxing, Chorrib’s project looks at what exists around the sport: the discipline, isolation, family relationships and quiet determination that shape the lives of those who train.
His practice is characterised by black-and-white photography, combining a journalistic approach with cinematic aesthetics. Tasweer describes his broader work as being concerned with collective memory, urban transformation and the resilience of marginalised communities. In A Pair of Gloves, these concerns come together through the culture of boxing and the people who sustain it.
The photographer’s interest extends beyond the physical contest of the ring. The project considers the mental isolation and dedication experienced by the boxers, while also exploring family bonds as an important source of resilience.
For Chorrib, photography becomes a means of creating an enduring archive of intimate stories that might otherwise remain largely unseen.
The project’s raw, direct visual language was also highlighted by juror Raneen Bukhari, who praised Chorrib’s ability to gain the trust of the community through long-term engagement. The jury noted that the project offers an intimate view into a community united around a sport associated with resilience and discipline.
Chorrib’s recognition also adds to an important year for the photographer. In 2026, he received third place in the second edition of the CDG Foundation Award for Young Moroccan Photography for his documentary series Echo of the High Arenas.
Haitham Nsais: turning the factory into a photographic archive
Moroccan photographer Haitham Nsais is also among the Tasweer Project Award recipients for Fallen Seagulls, a documentary project rooted in his own experience of working in a factory.
Born in Larache in 1998, Nsais began his photographic practice in 2018, initially concentrating on street photography and the everyday rhythms of his city. His work frequently examines the relationship between people and place, with particular attention to ordinary details that reveal the identity and character of an environment.
Fallen Seagulls takes this approach into an industrial setting.
The project documents the factory where Nsais worked for four years, recording the daily lives of his fellow workers and the spaces in which they spent much of their time. The resulting photographs look at labour not simply as an economic activity but as an experience shaped by repetition, physical environments, routine and human relationships.
Because Nsais was himself part of this environment, the project carries a degree of proximity that would be difficult to achieve as an outside observer. Tasweer notes that his approach is based on living within and engaging directly with the spaces he photographs, allowing the work to take on a personal and human dimension.
This connection was central to the jury’s assessment. Juror Linda Al Khoury described the project as a long-term documentary work in which Nsais takes the viewer into the hidden spaces of the factory and its workers’ daily lives. She particularly noted the importance of his relationship to the place, describing him not as a visitor but as someone who belonged to it.
The use of black and white further strengthens the project, directing attention towards the workers, industrial spaces and small details of everyday labour.
In this sense, Fallen Seagulls becomes more than a record of a workplace. It is an account of a period of the photographer’s own life and an attempt to preserve the experiences of people whose labour can otherwise disappear into the background of industrial life.
El Mehdi Kharbouch: memory, disappearance and the changing landscape
The third Moroccan photographer recognised this year is El Mehdi Kharbouch, who received the Tasweer Single Image Award for Remnants of a Picnic.
Kharbouch is a visual artist and photographer from Morocco’s Souss-Massa region. Working across photography, video and experimental visual media, his practice explores memory, belonging and the transformation of landscapes through archival material and visual assemblage.
Remnants of a Picnic brings together an old family photograph with a contemporary landscape in southern Morocco.
The work is built around a striking contrast between past and present. The family photograph evokes a place that once carried personal and collective meaning, while the contemporary landscape reveals what remains after that environment has changed.
According to Kharbouch’s statement, the site now appears as a barren space, with traces of withered trees and memories standing in for what has disappeared. The old photograph therefore functions as an incomplete archive—one that preserves a fragment of the past while also revealing how fragile memory can become over time.
The photograph’s combination of black-and-white and colour imagery reinforces this tension between memory and the present. Rather than treating photography as a fixed document of history, Kharbouch uses the medium to question how places are remembered, reconstructed and imagined after they have changed.
The result is a work concerned not only with personal nostalgia but also with the broader relationship between people and the landscapes they inhabit.
A wider recognition of photographic storytelling across WANA
The three Moroccan winners form part of a much broader group of photographers selected through the 2026 Tasweer Awards.
The Tasweer Project Award recognised 10 photographers, including Chorrib and Nsais, while the Tasweer Single Image Award recognised 20 photographers, including Kharbouch. The winners come from across Western Asia and North Africa, with projects spanning documentary photography, personal storytelling, portraiture and experimental approaches to the medium.
The 2026 jury comprised Dr Issam Nassar, Professor of History and Head of Programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies; Linda Al Khoury, photographer, curator and founder of Darat Al Tasweer and Image Festival – Amman; and Raneen Bukhari, curator and arts advocate based in Saudi Arabia.
Now in its sixth year, the awards are designed to support photographic practices across the WANA region. The Project Award provides selected photographers with a QAR 30,000 grant to develop, initiate or complete a photographic project, alongside curatorial guidance, mentorship and opportunities to present their work through Tasweer. The Single Image Award provides each selected photographer with a QAR 2,000 prize, as well as opportunities for online exhibition and participation in the festival’s wider public programme.
The distinction between the two awards also reflects two different approaches to photographic practice. The Project Award is intended to enable longer-term bodies of work to develop, while the Single Image Award recognises the power of an individual photograph to communicate a personal or wider social narrative.
Moroccan photography in a regional conversation
The three Moroccan selections demonstrate the diversity of approaches emerging from the country’s contemporary photographic scene.
Chorrib’s A Pair of Gloves examines resilience through sport and community. Nsais’s Fallen Seagulls looks at labour through the intimate perspective of someone who experienced the workplace from within. Kharbouch’s Remnants of a Picnic, meanwhile, turns towards memory and the transformation of landscape.
Despite their differences, all three projects share an interest in the lives and places that are often overlooked.
Their photographs do not rely on spectacle. Instead, they find meaning in ordinary environments, personal histories and the traces left behind by social and physical change. In doing so, they reflect one of the central strengths of documentary and contemporary photography: its ability to make visible experiences that might otherwise remain undocumented.
The recognition of three Moroccan photographers at the 2026 Tasweer Awards therefore represents more than a national achievement. It places distinct Moroccan perspectives within a larger regional conversation about how photography can document lived experience, preserve memory and question the forces transforming communities and landscapes.
The winning works from 2026 are also set to join those selected in 2025 in an exhibition at the fourth edition of Tasweer Photo Festival in 2027, giving audiences an opportunity to encounter these projects within the broader context of contemporary photography from Western Asia and North Africa.
For Chorrib, Nsais and Kharbouch, the awards provide not only recognition but also a platform for their stories to travel beyond the places in which they were made. Their selections underscore the continuing importance of photography as a form of archive—one capable of preserving the intensity of a boxing community, the quiet realities of industrial labour, or the memory of a landscape that no longer looks the way it once did.
