Photographer Ilyes Griyeb takes us to Senegal's salt lakes

In the constant stream of emails touting obscure art exhibitions at temporary galleries in Brooklyn, the good stuff is sometimes hard to spot. Luckily, the work of photographer Ilyes Griyeb not only made it into the hands of the It’s Nice That team but impressed us so much that we struggled to narrow the 50-something page long PDF of his Retba Lake project down into ten images.

Ilyes lives in Paris, but he was born in Meknes, Morocco. It was here that he found photography. “I started shooting my cousin and his friends in Morocco during some holidays with an analogue camera,” he told us. “When I saw the photos for the first time I really felt something about the living conditions of my cousin and his friends. Something I couldn’t have seen with my normal eyes. And of course, after that, I wanted to bring this testimony of mine to the rest of the world.” That series was Moroccan Youth.

His home country continues to feature heavily in Ilyes work, but recently, a project took him to Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. There was an unexpected twist. “At first, I was brought to Senegal by a client who wanted me to shoot a story about the salt production there,” Ilyes explains. “The job was cancelled and I found myself free to shoot something for myself. I had the choice to leave the country or to continue. It was when I met the people around the lake that I decided to stay and shoot their story.”

The lake was UNESCO World Heritage site Lake Retba, or “Lac Rose”, the pink lake that lies just 18 miles north east of Dakar. The lake’s rose hue is due to the presence of dunaliella salina algae, an aquatic plant which produces a red pigment to help it absorb light. Locally, the lake is significant for its high salt content which reaches 40%.

Lake Retba salt is exported across Senegal and beyond, but as Ilyes explains, it is not so much of an industry as a community. “Lake Retba is a free place: anybody can come and drain salt from it, they just ask for seriousness, honesty and hard labour. The workers come, for the most part, from a village next to the lake called Niaga, but there are also a lot of foreigners from border countries like Mali, Guinea or even Ivory Coast. They leave their countries because of lack of work.”

One of the men Ilyes met at Lake Retba was from Mali, but had lived for a time in Saudi Arabia before returning to the lake. “He was one of the workers who built Saudi’s skyscrapers. He told me that he was offered a dream that has never been realised. The working conditions there were really far from what he expected. He lasted there several years hoping for a better escape before coming back home. Finally, working at the lake for half of the year then spending the rest of the year with his family wasn’t that bad after all.”

lyes’ Moroccan heritage became an unexpected asset in the photographer’s trip. “Being from the same background — Muslim and of African origin — they really accepted me as one of their own and not as a tourist. I lived with them for a week and they offered me anything I wanted. I’m still in contact with them today.”