Snake Family
Photographer Emily Chalk spent two weeks in Marrakesh photographing the Sadik family, one of only five families still practising the 500-year-old tradition of snake charming in Jemaa el-Fna. What begins with fear and assumptions about the practice develops into an intimate encounter with trust, inheritance and disappearing traditions – revealing the lives, rituals and relationships that exist beyond the spectacle.
Photography Emily Chalk
I didn't plan on having tea with a cobra. But Marrakesh had other ideas. I went there to photograph a family of snake charmers for a personal series. I showed up with research, mood boards and shot lists, the usual scaffolding. I expected animal cruelty, and people reluctant to let me near.
The Sadik family are one of five families still snake charming in Jemaa el-Fna, a tradition that goes back over 500 years, passed from father to son. Nobody had reason to trust a stranger with a camera, but it seemed like everyone in the medina knew my fixer Sigou, and he vouched for me.
“I didn't plan on having tea with a cobra. But Marrakesh had other ideas.”
On the first day, the charmer stepped away for the call to prayer and left me alone with a bag of live vipers. I watched the gap in the top of it, and the tiled floor between us, until he came back. I'm afraid of snakes.
I asked question after question through Sigou. The charmers smiled at me and happily answered each one. After several days, they invited me home for tea.
The mint tea, it turns out, is a ritual, and it has to be poured in a specific way. If you don't pour it tall and long, with froth that looks like the top of a well-poured pint in a London pub, it's extremely disrespectful. So I concentrated on learning the right way.
They spoke only Arabic, I understood none of it, and after a while they stopped talking to me and talked to each other. Sigou and the charmer bantering back and forth, and a cobra curled up on the seat next to him. It was the most amazing, bizarre moment of my life.
The next day they invited me to their home for lunch, a massive bowl of couscous, shared by us all. The snakes this time in bags at their feet.
“Snakes have no outer ear and can't hear the pipe, so what the cobra is watching is the charmer's hands. It's a dance.”
It isn't music, it's movement. Snakes have no outer ear and can't hear the pipe, so what the cobra is watching is the charmer's hands. It's a dance. The same snakes stay with the family for years, it’s a trust built up over time.
My preconceptions changed over the time I was there. My respect for their ways and their gentle natures, both with the snakes and with me, was a welcome surprise.
This series is about how quickly we oversimplify what we don't live inside, and what can happen when we slow down and really listen.
With thanks to Sigou, my fixer, who sold second-hand clothes from a stall in the souk, was a rap artist in his spare time, talked constantly in three languages, and vouched for a stranger with a camera.
“Most people in the square watch the performance and move on. Spending time with the Sadiks and eventually being invited into their homes meant seeing what happens either side of it: pride in the craft, the weight of inheritance, and the unspoken knowledge that this way of life is slowly disappearing.”
About Emily
Emily Chalk has always been drawn to the shadows as much as the light, because that's more often where the truth lives.
She's an advertising and lifestyle photographer based in Auckland, New Zealand, and often on a plane to somewhere else. Most of the year she's shooting for brands, agencies and magazines. The rest of the time she's telling the stories nobody asked her for.
Snake Family came out of two weeks in Marrakesh. Closer to home, she's been photographing family summers at a campground in Kuaotunu on the Coromandel for years now, a series called Jandals & Tomato Sauce. Takiwātangagrew out of life with her non-speaking autistic son, and the alternative ways families in the autistic community communicate.
Her work has been awarded at the International Photography Awards and Head On.
To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram
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