“The feeling was that this grief was irreparable,” she says. In her early 20s and living away from home, Lenain found herself mourning not only Farid, but everything she would never get the chance to ask him. “I felt like there was this huge void,” she says. “I realized there were all these questions that would never be answered. I wanted to know what faith meant to him. Did he feel accepted? What was necessary for him to feel alive and complete? I wondered if he felt the need to come out?”
No one else in the family could answer them, so she started looking elsewhere. What began as an attempt to understand one man evolved into six years of conversations, portraits and friendships. Traveling across France, she photographed around 50 queer Muslims and spent hours listening to stories about faith, family, desire, loss and belonging. “I felt like a therapist sometimes,” she laughs. “We would speak for hours, and there would be so many tears.”
Those conversations became as important as the photographs themselves. Lenain distilled them down into fragments of text she calls “poetic portraits,” weaving together memories, reflections and moments of revelation—individual voices connected to something larger than themselves. The more people Lenain met, the less interested she became in finding definitive answers, and that uncertainty began to shape the photographs themselves. Windows appear throughout the book. So do curtains, shadows, reflections and doorways. Lenain is fascinated by thresholds and portals. “To me, this speaks about privacy and openness at the same time,” she says. “I like these liminal spaces.”