This paper draws from a forthcoming book of photography and ethnographic description focused on a village in the High Atlas Mountains. The large format, black and white photos show people in their daily tasks: working, playing, talking, though always aware of, and often formally posing for, the camera. The process was dialogical, with the subjects selecting how and where they would be pictured in conversation with the photographer, his Tashelhit-speaking assistant, and an anthropologist who had long worked in the village. The accompanying texts attempt to put the images in a larger context. They explain relevant features outside the frame of the camera: who the people are, and how they came to be pictured, particularly by sketching something of the rich history embedded in their extended social world. Both photography and ethnography have been guilty of presenting rural people as timeless, as representatives of a past that urbanites have left behind. Photographs obviously freeze people as they were in a moment, and thus seem to suggest that the moment of the photograph extends limitlessly into the past and future. Ethnography, with its use of the “ethnographic present” tense, can be similarly faulted. The challenge of the current project is to place timeless words and photos in productive, and ultimately timeful, tension. The words inject intimate knowledge of the subjects’ pasts and personalities, and place them in time by drawing out details in the portraits and landscapes that have changed or are changing. What appears timeless to outsiders is not necessarily so. Unveiling the fluidity within the photos turns frozen images into rich palimpsests, and reveals how the past obtrudes into the present and how it is subtly, slowly effaced. The words of the subjects and the anthropologist working with them are meant to draw forth the dynamism of rural life from the still images on the page, and illuminate how this specific place articulates with the broad currents of our shared epoch.