Camille Farrah Lenain Gently Stokes Queer Muslim Love
IN IMAGES
With Made of Smokeless Fire****, the French-Algerian photographer delivers a collective portrait of queer Muslim youth in France, where faith and desire quietly intertwine.
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Camille Farrah Lenain
In 2013, the death of her uncle Farid shook Camille Farrah Lenain. Born into an Algerian Muslim family in France, a man open about his homosexuality among his relatives, he held his mother and aunts together beyond their quarrels, keeping “an invisible bond between them.” She remembers a joyful rock, strong and funny.
Ever since, the author has turned over the questions she never dared ask him while he lived. “Farid, did you believe in God?” By way of answer, she gathers “silence, memories of grief,” “the echo of his laughter […] some Madonna CDs,” and a new uncle inherited from the absent one: “Thierry, his partner.”
Around this beloved ghost gathers a chorus of the living. In France, where Islamophobia readily erases queer Muslim lives, those who stand before her lens patiently weave their networks of care and self-affirmation. In Marseille, in 2022, Bouchta confides: “The mourning of the gays who have suffered, who are still resilient like a phoenix rising from its ashes…”
Camille Farrah Lenain’s gaze gathers apparitions. A face veiled in pink tulle surfaces in a mirror ringed with dried flowers, rolled-up rugs on green mosaic tiles tell of prayer suspended, two doves perch on open hands, white prayer beads slip through fingers behind a red curtain worthy of a cabaret.
Everywhere, the same Mediterranean light, warm and low, brushes henna tattoos, curls of incense, kohl-rimmed eyes, veils, half-open shutters, misted windowpanes. Tenderness sits beside melancholy, modesty embraces beauty.
A poem by Fatima Daas, the novelist who rose to prominence with The Last One, opens the book. In it she strokes the body of a mother weakened by illness: “The scars on her stomach, I stroke.” The mother, for her part, speaks without naming: “You came out through the door, you’re different,” then, without warning: “And A she’s doing well?” The daughter reads a silent sentence there: “Your life is worth as much as your sisters’.”
The book’s title, Made Of Smokeless Fire, draws on a Quranic image: the djinn are born of a smokeless fire, creatures neither quite visible nor quite absent. Fatima Daas closes her poem with a daughter’s address to her mother: “Thank you for passing on to me the faith. God’s love. Love of women.” Two loves, one flame.
by Camille Farrah Lenain, with a text by Fatima Daas (English, French, Arabic), 128 pages, 60 colour plates is published by Loose Joints, 2026, and is available for 50€.
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