Almost all the photographs in Les Femmes du Maroc are based on specific nineteenth-century European and American Orientalist paintings. Essaydi has, however, radically transformed the antecedents. While she retains the compositions, gestures, and general costume of the original paintings, she strips them of their opulent colors, removes male figures (or transforms them into women), erases any cues to social status, clothes all nudity, and simplifies the settings by eliminating props and attributes while introducing all-over draperies, and of course her ubiquitous calligraphy.