Camille Farrah Lenain’s Made of Smokeless Fire takes shape around a death. Her uncle Farid grew up gay in a Muslim Algerian family, and the work began as testimony and homage in the wake of his loss, opening outward into a collective portrait of queer Muslim life in France — home to one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations, where such lives are often rendered invisible. Lenain made the book’s sixty colour photographs. Fatima Daas contributes text in English, French and Arabic, and Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume with Lenain.
What distinguishes the work is its relational footing. Lenain photographs people negotiating overlapping pressures — some distanced from family, some reinterpreting cultural inheritance, many forging networks of safety and affirmation. Warm Mediterranean light and a colour-heavy, dreamlike register make the scenes feel tender yet slightly dislocated. Gestures and domestic fragments carry more weight than explanation. Grounded in trust rather than spectacle, the portraits move between visibility and concealment, honouring lives lived in careful secrecy.
Loose Joints issues the book as a section-sewn OTA-bound softcover at 22 by 28 centimetres, with reversed debossed flaps and multiple paper stocks; the design is by Loose Joints Studio, with cover artwork by Anousha Payne. Across 144 pages, the sequencing holds memorial and repair together, honouring lives that have remained unspoken or sidelined across generations.
For collectors, the book’s relevance lies in where it sits: a French-Algerian photographer’s sustained inquiry into identity, memory and belonging, extending a body of work exhibited internationally, and a collaboration among photographer, writer, editor and designer that treats print as the argument’s proper form. Daas’s trilingual text anchors the images in more than one reading public, and the physical construction asks to be handled, not merely filed.
