From Winston Churchill’s Easel to the Stock-Image Archive: Moroccan Fauna as Destination Image Formation

Mohammed Ajrinija; Kamal El Fouadi

doi:10.14505/jemt.v17.3(83).08

Mohammed Ajrinija Lab of Language, Culture, and Text: Multidisciplinary Approaches Cadi Ayyad University Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Marrakesh, Morocco https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2414-0600
Kamal El Fouadi ab of Language, Culture, and Text: Multidisciplinary Approaches Cadi Ayyad University Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Marrakesh, Morocco

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14505/jemt.v17.3(83).08

Abstract

This article investigates how a limited repertoire of animal imagery has shaped the Western visual representation of Morocco across different media for more than eighty years. It argues that donkeys, camels, and goats function as recurring visual codes that construct Morocco as timeless, exotic, and culturally distinct, thereby influencing its international destination image.
The study examines paintings by Winston Churchill, The Sheltering Sky (1990), the guidebooks National Geographic Traveler Morocco (2011) and Insight Guides Explore Marrakesh (2019), as well as images from digital platforms, considered as an intermedial corpus. It draws on Gillian Rose’s critical visual methodology, postcolonial ecocriticism, theories of exoticism, and intermediality.
The same animal figures recur across painting, film, travel guides, and digital media, constructing an image of Morocco presented as timeless, picturesque, and exotic. This iconography shapes tourist expectations while marginalizing species emblematic of Morocco’s biodiversity, such as the Barbary macaque and the bald ibis.
The article proposes incorporating ethical principles into destination branding and promoting wildlife tourism based on conservation rather than the spectacle of animals.
The study shows that it is also animal-related signifiers - and not just narratives or landscapes - that are transmitted from one medium to another, establishing a novel link between postcolonial ecocriticism, intermediality, and tourism management.

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