Avenue Royale
Anne Mocaër
2021 – 2025 — Casablanca, Morocco
About this series
Avenue Royale is a long-term documentary project about the people living in a neighborhood of Casablanca, Morocco, facing the transformation of their homes and surroundings.
More than thirty years ago, a major urban redevelopment project was planned to embody Casablanca’s ambition to reshape and modernise its city centre, in a densely populated area of the city’s extra-muros medina, home to thousands of working-class families who have lived there for generations. Yet the project stalled for years, leaving residents caught in a prolonged state of uncertainty.
Between 2021 and 2025, I photographed the people living along the planned route: Achraf, Youssef, Zakaria and his family, Hicham, Fatima, Amina and others. Through portraits and photographs of their everyday surroundings, I followed their lives in a neighborhood caught between two worlds, two times, two homes; between standing walls and demolished ones; between a place they can no longer fully live in and one they do not want to move to.
Through an intimate documentary approach, the photographs seek to capture what lies within this larger architectural narrative: faces, memories, relationships and lived time. The work reflects on the relationship between heritage, memory, belonging and urban development.
Today, most of the neighbourhood has been demolished as Morocco prepares to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup.
Photographer: Anne Mocaër
Nationality: French
Based in: Marseille, France – Casablanca, Morocco
Website: annemocaer.com
Instagram: @anne_mocaer
Anne Mocaër is a French self-taught documentary photographer. After growing up in several countries and pursuing an international career in education, she turned to photography in 2021.
Her work explores the often-invisible forces that shape our relationship to bodies, places and others. Through long-term documentary projects, she observes how social and political structures, intimate experiences, memory, loss and transformation become embodied in gestures, relationships and ways of inhabiting the world. Moving between the personal and the collective, her practice combines a documentary approach with a sensitive and sometimes more intuitive visual language.
*Alongside her artistic practice, she regularly collaborates with the national and international press (Le Monde, M Le Magazine du Monde, La Déferlante, De Standaard, New Lines Magazine), and develops training programs combining photography and language learning.
Her work has been exhibited in France and internationally, including at Somerset House (London), the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and the Museum of Photography and visual arts of Casablanca. She received the Prix Galerie Le Bleu du Ciel in 2025 and the Prix Réponses Photo at Les Boutographies in 2026. She is a recipient of the Women Photograph Mentorship in 2026.