Author Spotlight: Storytelling with Fiona McDougall

We caught up with Pulitzer-Prize-nominated photographer and producer Fiona McDougall to talk about her project, Moroccan Moments.

Fiona has 20 years of international experience in photojournalism, editorial, and corporate photography, and in the last five years has become a frequently published video producer. Photography assignments have taken her to locations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

It was her coverage of the Somali Civil War that inspired The New York Times to nominate Fiona for a Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been exhibited in Australia, New York, San Francisco, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. She has been published in TIME, Newsweek, and United Nations publications. She is the author of Tibetan Journal, published by Ten Speed Press, and has contributed photojournalism to numerous publications, including The New York Times. She is also the producer of several videos and other work, which can be seen on her company’s website or YouTube.

Moroccan Moments shows beautiful photographs of the people, food, street life, views, and captured moments seen in and around the towns of El Jadida, Essaouira, and Fez. She took the photos in September 2014, drawing on her fascination with Paul Bowles’ book, Sheltering Sky, which brought her to the country. The book is a OneWorld Photo publication using Blurb, and expresses the OneWorld brand experience of telling stories and connecting with people in diverse cultures.

Here is her story, in her words.

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I’ve only ever really been scared three times in my life. The first time was in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1992, whilst on assignment for The New York Times. The U.S. Marines shouted to all photographers and reporters to lie face down on the ground while pointing their guns at our heads and yelling obscenities.

The other was a couple of years later when I lived on a remote hilltop in southern Tanzania to photograph a United Nations project. I only had a kerosene lamp to guide me through the black, windy nights, and was the only foreigner for miles around.

And finally, at Samye Ling Monastery in Tibet in 1997, when photographing South African Buddhists on a pilgrimage, I had severe altitude sickness, which forced me to lie down under a tree for three days during. The sickness came with mental images of myself in a coffin.

What took me to Somalia, Tanzania, Tibet, and other parts of the world was a journey driven by my fascination with visual storytelling.

The project

This same desire for storytelling pulled me forward through Morocco in 2014—a country I’ve longed to visit since reading Paul Bowles’ novel, The Sheltering Sky. The powerful way Bowles wrote about his characters’ responses to this exotic, captivating, and at times harsh environment had never left me.

Although Morocco doesn’t have the same challenges as some of my prior travels did, I was concerned about being a woman doing street photography in a culture where women shielded themselves beneath billowy traditional black djellabas, and imams sat conspicuously in front of their mosques. However, I found a way to blend in as much as a Caucasian redhead could by covering my head and shoulders with a long scarf, sleeves rolled down, and pants worn to the ankles. The scarf also served to hide my compact camera, which I found worked well to capture street life without being noticed.

As I explored the cobbled pavements or sat on the hard seats of the long bumpy bus and train rides, the light, spirit, and beauty of this exotic and mesmerizing culture captivated me: women sitting on boxes in the street as they shelled beans, children peeking out behind big wooden doors, young men dressed in American sneakers, large wooden trays of bread being whisked along narrow streets, the colors and the textures of the mosques and so much more as seen in the photographs I took.

Brand experience

A key reason I chose to create and publish Moroccan Moments is to continue to express the persona of my firm, OneWorld Communications.

OneWorld, an advertising agency in San Francisco, specializes in multicultural marketing and is a member of the international consortium of advertising agencies, Tribe Global. We connect with diverse communities and audiences through our cross-cultural creation of digital and traditional media, ranging from online to TV and radio commercials.

My photography in Morocco is not a marketing piece for a client, of course, but it is a way of showing my point of view—how we can connect with people in cultures different from our own.

Promotion

As a Video Producer at OneWorld, I promoted my book in different ways. We sent Moroccan Moments as a Christmas gift to colleagues and clients who appreciate our point of view and direction! We put out a press release on PR Newswire to clients, colleagues, and editors, which included links to the book on our website, with links to buy the book on the Blurb website. We promoted the book also through our international affiliation, Tribe Global and their social media channels, as well as through posts on our Facebook.

Why Blurb

I’d researched other book publishing platforms but felt Blurb offered better photo layout options. I needed easy ways to have full bleed, crop images, and print on good paper stock.

Next steps

I’m thinking about a photographic essay collection using Blurb which would document my editorial related stories in Africa and elsewhere. I’ve also thought about summarizing some of our media campaigns for clients in short publications showing our creative work, and statistics of the numbers of people who responded.

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We’re grateful Fiona gave us a peek into her Moroccan Moments project, and we can’t wait to see what she does next.