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AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY JACQUES OLIVAR

I was born in Casablanca in 1941. I never met Michael Curtiz, Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but I breathed the spiced smells of the souks. I listened to people speaking Arabic and tasted their wisdom. I slept in the caves of Aglou. I played truand to go and find the heat of the golden beaches of Casablanca's coast. I listened all night long to the radio, to the first notes of the wonderful new and meteoric American music that is rock 'n' roll. It was as if it had travelled infinite distances between the twinkling stars relayed by the aerials of the American air bases of the new world staying in Morocco and light-years away before swiping across Europe.

I was locked up in a kid's jail called school. I escaped so many times and got caught so many times. Then, my parents died, and I was never caught again. From my gypsy Andalusian mother, I inherited her music and the fatal attraction of being the nowhere man. So I hit the road. Meanwhile, Alfred Hitchcock was filming The Man Who Knew Too Much in Marrakech, one of the Technicolor masterpieces that inspired me so much.

Icarus seduced me in a flash, but his wings melted in the sun. On my way, I met this other homeless kid, Isabel, and we escaped one more time. In Crete Island, I played music and hanged around the ochre sand beaches, lived in houses at the top of Mount Olympus and their biblical views, and tried to change the world a hundred times with my rainbow of wandering peers. Neither my son, my road companion nor myself, went back to school - this universal area of formatting and cloning. I cut wood and picked olives off thousand-year-old olive trees. The mysterious Tangier had been on the way. The east wind flowing between Gibraltar and the cliffs of Malabata blows away stories of spies, funny business, and visionary writers seeking crazy freedom. Gone with the wind. Gone with the wind were the very good-looking people and the very refined prostitutes coming from Europe. Gone with the wind was the thrilling international area that was Tangier in the fifties. To the young boy I was, it was an unforgettable sight which forever marks the adolescent imagination: clandestine markets, mafia's gold freely flowing, and smuggling on every small hidden street. Truths and lies blew with the east wind until becoming insane in the evil drunkenness of the Tangier of my adolescence.

There was Jean Genet who was buried in Larache. Then his friend, the brilliant and somber writer Mohamed Choukri. As well as the Beat generation poets such as Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs. I carefully packed them all in my bags. Then, Paris welcomed me warmly and tenderly as her prodigal son. I loved making pictures, and Paris loved them. From John Steinbeck, I retain these faces in my pictures that are impassive in front of fate. From Tennessee Williams, I retain the image of the fragility and loneliness of Southern people. From John Dos Passos, his love for storytelling. From Federico Garcia Lorca, I retain the sharp pain of four stabs and voices that echo on the Guadalquivir River. Without them I certainly would never have taken pictures, at least not as I do. I took pictures of wonderful people. I worked for wonderful people. All throughout my career, I met great people. I ran away so often, and this time I was never caught again.