Fernand Bidon

Fernand Bidon was a French photographer who worked under the pseudonym Félix. Born in Marseille, Bidon lived and worked in Marrakech between 1912 and 1963; he was one of the first resident photographers of Morocco. During France’s occupation of Morocco, a number of French artists visited the country to document, through European eyes, the culture of the region. Bidon captured hundreds of images of street life in Marrakech, including photographs of the city’s Jewish quarter and its residents. Bidon used his photographs to produce postcards, likely capitalizing on the popularity of the exoticized Middle Eastern imagery found in French orientalist painting of the period. The majority of his images are in black and white, although he is known to have experimented with a small series in color. Bidon’s work remains in the collection of the Marrakech Museum of Photography and Visual Arts.