Made of Smokeless Fire

Camille Farrah Lenain - USA
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Camille Lenain _ Leica Women Foto Project 2024


Explore The Series

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Camille Lenain _ Leica Women Foto Project 2024

Habibitch in their bedroom in Paris. “[Our anger], is only a response to the violence that we have suffered or are undergoing and for me, it is important to redo the chronology of anger and violence, because we often forget that they are just reactions. They are not ex nihilo, they are not attacks, they are angry defenses.”

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Camille Lenain _ Leica Women Foto Project 2024

Lalla Rami lays down in the garden in front of her apartment in Boulogne, wearing a traditional fez and a belly scarf. “It is through the eyes of others that you can tell that I am a trans, Moroccan and Muslim woman, or whatever the fuck you see. But from me to myself, I’m just a badass girl named Lalla Rami.”

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Camille Lenain _ Leica Women Foto Project 2024

Djalil stands in his living room, looking at the neighbouring buildings in Lyon. “It’s like a knot in your stomach, as if you were burning from the inside, as if you felt your heart blazing, and then you say to yourself -- what is going on?” 

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Camille Lenain _ Leica Women Foto Project 2024

Bouchta wears a scarf on her face and looks at the mirror in her appartment in Marseille. “It’s like an old story that keeps coming back over and over again. I am very melancholic, but it’s my life. Like a lot of gay people’s lives, it’s not an easy life. We are always looking for a little quiet corner for self-preservation. We meditate, we exist in our corner and this photograph is a separate universe that we all have within ourselves : a closet, a trunk, a drawer. It’s very mystical. It’s like a past, present and future, it is eternal.”

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Camille Lenain _ Leica Women Foto Project 2024

About Camille Farrah Lenain

Camille Farrah Lenain is a French-Algerian documentary and portrait photographer who grew up in Paris, studied Photography at l’ESA in Brussels and at ICP in New York City (virtual). She relocated to New Orleans in 2013, where she works on long-term projects with a focus on empathetic portraiture, exploring the notions of stereotypes, collective memory and plural identities. 

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