Rabat – Moroccan photographer Hicham Benohoud has won the 2025 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Award for Photobook of the Year for his powerful work “The Classroom.”
This win marks a big milestone in Benohoud’s journey, which began in a very unlikely place: the middle-school classroom of his hometown, Marrakech.
Born in Marrakech in 1968, Benohoud discovered his love for art early on. He studied visual arts in high school, but because of financial constraints and limited opportunities in Morocco, he stayed in his homeland and became an art teacher.
For 13 years, he taught teenagers aged roughly 11 to 15 in a Marrakech school. But instead of letting the classroom be just a place of routine teaching, he transformed it into his creative studio.
Between 1994 and 2002, Benohoud staged more than a hundred black-and-white photographs in that classroom, involving his actual students. He set up a makeshift darkroom, directed students into poses, gave them props like paper tubes, cloth, cardboard, and encouraged them to be playful, sometimes haunting, sometimes absurd.
In some images, desks are stacked into a double-decker structure; in others, students lie on tables or seem bound by cardboard limbs. The classroom was more than just a backdrop in this creative enterprise; it was a stage, with light and space used to turn students’ bodies into “living sculptures.”
Although the images appear calm and composed, they show an underlying tension, as Benohoud is not just documenting his students, but directing them, creating scenes that reflect power dynamics, control, and confinement.
The work has been read as a critique of Morocco’s rigid educational system in the 1990s, especially how structure, discipline, and lack of real freedom limited students, both socially and economically.
Many of his students came from disadvantaged backgrounds, and he used these staged photos to comment on how their socio-economic realities constrained their future. As Benohoud himself has said, giving children this space to play with creativity in a strict classroom was his way of questioning authority, tradition, and identity.
Loose Joints, an independent publisher in London, released “The Classroom” as a photobook, drawing on Benohoud’s archive of negatives. In its award announcement, the Paris Photo-Aperture jury praised the book as “a model for creativity, and of making the most of what you have,” noting how Benohoud transformed routine art classes into “a joyful site of photographic ingenuity and hands-on learning.”
