Leila Alaoui obituary

The photographer Leila Alaoui has died aged 33 of a heart attack after being shot in terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Alaoui was in Ouagadougou to work on a photography project for a women’s rights campaign called My Body My Rights for Amnesty International.

Her work appeared in publications including the New York Times and Vogue, and her photographs have been widely exhibited. She was probably best known for a series of portraits of Moroccan people, shown recently in Paris at the Biennial of Contemporary Arab World Photography. “It’s work I began in 2010 but it’s ongoing,” she told me in an interview in November. “Moroccans have the most complicated relationship to photography among Arabs because they are very apprehensive due to superstition. They are also tired of tourism, so there is a sort of rejection of the camera. My hope was to show traditional Moroccans without the folklore.”

One of three children of a French mother, Christine (nee Abrate), and a Moroccan father, Abdelaziz Alaoui, a businessman, Leila was born in Paris and grew up in Marrakech. As an adolescent, she wanted to become a photojournalist. She studied photography and anthropology at the City University of New York and was inspired by the work of the US photographers Richard Avedon and Robert Frank.

After working in photography and film, Alaoui returned to Morocco in 2008 when she received a grant from the European Union for a photographic project on migrants, a subject which remained of constant interest to her, as did the humanitarian consequences of migration. She explained: “I wanted to do a project on cultural diversity. I’m from Morocco but when I travel from region to region, I have the impression of being in a different country each time. I wanted to make a cultural road trip like Robert Frank did with The Americans. It’s important to capture these traditions that are disappearing and to create a visual archive.”