Since this bothered him profoundly, perhaps Tanner needed to find a place where things would be different, and Tangier may have been that place. As an exotic North African locale where much of the population was dark-skinned, Tangier could have served Tanner as a gateway to freedom from the burden imposed on him as a black man by Western racial prejudice. Finding an escape from the Western mode of thought and its pitfalls 
seems to have been a significant reason for Tanner’s visit to Morocco in early 1912, and he occasionally used Tangier as a base to explore the smaller surrounding towns, in search of places even less influenced by Western civilization (Mosby Tanner 205). Moreover, since North African architecture abounds with gates and arched doors (Mosby Tanner 205), this image of Tangier as a gateway found its way naturally into all of Tanner’s work that was based on his time in the Moroccan city. The nature of these gateway images vary in the different etchings and oil paintings, representing Tanner’s mixed feelings on being in a foreign Muslim culture and about how accessible Tangier actually was to him. We cannot, however, place Tanner’s shifting perceptions during his visit to Tangier into a clear chronological progression: the order of his Tangier artwork is ambiguous and a few of his works were completed as late as a couple years after he left North Africa (Mosby Tanner 231). Without a chronology for us to follow, a logical way for Tanner’s depiction of gateways to help us examine his feelings on the increasing inaccessibility of Moroccan culture is to trace these depictions in such a way that explains why Tanner became more and more distant from Tangier and its gates. By progressing from closest to most distant, perhaps we can understand why Tanner did not return to a place like Tangier and why the Tangier series is so unusual and isolated among his works.
Image:
Tanner, Henry Ossawa. Entrance to the Customs House, Tangier, 1908. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY.