Photographer Ina Niehoff's "pure and silent" look at the Moroccan countryside

She may be based in Berlin, but photographer Ina Niehoff certainly gets around, documenting everything from dated hotel décor in Croatia/Bosnia–Herzegovina border town Neum to a weekend trip to Istanbul.

Lately, Ina ended up in Morocco, where she was particularly “touched by the colours and the light, the integration of nature into architecture or useful objects”. Her images have an outside-in feel, making them, and her, feel strangely separate from the scenes she captures.

“Morocco was a place I wanted to visit for many, many years, but it somehow never happened,” the photographer tells It’s Nice That. “This summer my boyfriend got a request to do a music video there and in the end they asked me to join the project, helping them out with location scouting and framing, so finally I had the opportunity to go.”

Despite her long-held curiosity around Marrakesh and her desire to “stroll the city and capture its sense”, the video shoot was staged far away from the city, across the Atlas Mountains in Agdz. “I was really disappointed about that fact, but couldn’t change the situation: I was somehow bound to the car and the time schedule of the job. In the end I’m very happy to have found these more lonesome places, to have get a sense of the countryside and landscape… I guess my images turned out very different in the end to the idea I’d always had in mind, and this is what I like about them: to me, my Morocco images are more a study of landscape and architecture, an analysis of how the people interact with their landscape and their direct surroundings.”

“There are no piles of spices, no snakes on the markets, it’s definitely more pure and silent. This is not what I expected. If you can see people, you mainly see them from far away and from behind. I definitely don’t want to skim the idea Moroccans aren’t open minded or easy to get in touch with, it’s more about me I think, to keep the idea that I wasn’t ‘really there’. Do you know what I mean?”