[1] Marcelin Flandrin settled in Morocco in 1901, where he completed his military service as a volunteer in 1912.

A photographer by profession, he served in the Service Photographique des Armées (fr), completing a series of reports during the Rif War.

He was also the first to do aerial photography in Morocco; he notably captured the last known photograph of a wild Barbary lion in the Atlas Mountains, taken on a flight from Casablanca to Dakar in 1925.

Marcelin Flandrin also created many nude orientalist postcards of Moroccan women in the Bousbir, or quartier réservé, a colonial brothel-city in Casablanca.

Flandrin was influential in creating the stereotype of the "Arab African" prostitute: young, brown, exotic looking (to the European eye) topless and wearing robes or kaftans.