In 2012, after twelve years away, Yasmina Benabderrahmane returned to Morocco. She crossed its dunes and plains with a Super-8 camera, filming a landscape that would not hold still. The stills drawn from those films are what MACK published in 2020 as La Bête, un conte moderne, a French-language volume of 370 pages.

The route runs through the Bouregreg Valley, where a new cultural centre stands as an emblem of the country’s changing face, and out to the Chichaoua plains — rocky, pared back — where villages sit in a place that seems to keep its own time. Benabderrahmane works in the territory between tradition and modernity without treating either as a settled condition.

What distinguishes the book is its refusal to separate cinema from the still image. Each page holds a frame lifted out of a moving sequence, and the OTA-bound paperback — 17 by 27 cm, co-published with Le Bal in Paris — is built for that pace of looking: accumulated, unhurried, filmic. It is a photographically serious book that arrives from filmmaking.

Her subject is a Morocco written into bodies and terrain, in stones that fall and blood that thickens — a history she calls sensitive, mineral, instinctive. Familiarity does not make these places stable; her gaze returns to the same ground and finds it altered.

For collectors, the interest lies there rather than in any claim of rarity: a long, deliberately sequenced volume by a photographer working across two mediums, with a French edition and an English one issued alongside it. It asks for the patience one gives a film, not the quick scan given a portfolio.