The question of visibility, understood as whose lives are acknowledged and by what visual means, lies at the center of Kat Puchowska’s long-term project Morocco: The Rhythm of the Street. Between 2017 and 2024, Kat undertook repeated journeys across the country, moving through the winding souks of Fes, the hilltop terraces of Chefchaouen, the alleyways of Meknès, and the smaller villages of the Middle Atlas. Over these seven years, she has built an extensive archive of photographs that draw attention away from the language of state-led progress and toward the modest yet vital rhythms of survival and creativity that sustained daily life in Morocco during this period.

Living between cultures, dividing her time between Spain and the United Kingdom after growing up in Poland, Kat brings a sensitivity to questions of belonging and identity that shapes how she approaches these spaces. Her perspective has also been shaped by years of travel to more than forty countries, experiences that sharpen her awareness of both the uniqueness of place and the quiet continuities that connect people across borders.

For Kat, photography begins with an ethic of respect, a commitment to observing without intrusion and to letting daily life speak for itself. She works only with natural light and avoids staging or interference, positioning herself instead as a patient witness. The images she creates are the result of immersion and a careful negotiation between distance and intimacy. They emphasize process over performance, allowing labor to be seen not as a statistic or abstraction but as a lived reality embedded in social and cultural space.

The photographs themselves operate at several registers. At one level, they document markets, alleyways, workshops, and gestures, the physical and social infrastructures of the informal economy. At another, they function as studies of cultural identity, tracing how clothing, architecture, and everyday interaction articulate Morocco’s layered histories. Kat’s own experience of navigating life across multiple cultural contexts, combined with her extensive travel, lends her work a particular attentiveness to these intersections, sharpening her awareness of how place and identity continually shape one another. Each photograph holds both the specificity of place and the broader universality of human endurance. Rather than isolated impressions, they accumulate into a composite record that is at once cultural and economic, showing how Morocco’s diverse histories are inscribed in everyday gestures while also revealing the dependence of entire communities on forms of labor that remain unacknowledged in official accounts of progress.

Kat unsettles conventional economic storytelling. Her photographs invite us to think critically about how modernization is narrated, and whose labor is excluded from its metrics. What emerges is an argument for photography as a mode of counter-history, one that challenges dominant frameworks of visibility and insists on the importance of lived experience.

As The Rhythm of the Street unfolds, the work reveals itself as one shaped by patience, empathy, and a deep respect for the lives it portrays. Kat’s Morocco is not a place of stereotypes or display, but of small gestures that carry weight: the rhythm of a market, the pause of rest in the shade, the quiet dignity of work done day after day. What follows is a conversation with Kat Puchowska about her project, her journey as a photographer, and the values that continue to shape her way of seeing.