In the mid-2000s, Mohamed Bourouissa began staging photographs with friends and acquaintances in the Paris banlieues, borrowing the compositional grammar of history painting to picture lives that French public imagery tended to flatten or ignore. Confrontations, gatherings, glances, and held gestures accumulate into scenes of unmistakable tension, pitched somewhere between Delacroix and Jeff Wall. Made between 2005 and 2008, against the backdrop of the riots that shook the French suburbs over social inequality, the series both engages and parodies the media’s representation of the banlieues and their inhabitants, refusing the simplifications that dominated coverage of those years.
Périphérique, published by Loose Joints in 2021, is the first full presentation of that body of work. It gathers roughly 120 photographs alongside more than sixty pages of previously unseen preparatory images drawn from Bourouissa’s archive, which together make visible the observation, preparation, and collaboration with his subjects that shaped the finished pictures. The book is therefore as much a record of method as of result: the staging that defines the series is shown to be a negotiated, deliberate act rather than a spontaneous one. Two newly commissioned essays, by Taous R. Dahmani and Clément Chéroux, reconsider the work’s original context in light of social, economic, and political questions that remain unresolved. Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, the volume is designed and published by Loose Joints; texts appear in English and French.
What distinguishes this edition is the care given to the sequence and its physical form. At 230 by 340 mm, with 172 pages, an open-spine softcover binding, gatefolds, and multiple paper stocks, the book lets the large, theatrical images hold the page while the preparatory material interrupts and complicates them. For a collector, the interest lies less in any single plate than in the argument the whole object makes: that a landmark series is best understood together with the process behind it, and that a re-examination of the banlieues in 2021 can still carry the urgency of the moment it depicts.
