\u201cThe feeling was that this grief was irreparable,\u201d 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. \u201cI felt like there was this huge void,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI felt like a therapist sometimes,\u201d she laughs. \u201cWe would speak for hours, and there would be so many tears.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those conversations became as important as the photographs themselves. Lenain distilled them down into fragments of text she calls \u201cpoetic portraits,\u201d weaving together memories, reflections and moments of revelation\u2014individual 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. \u201cTo me, this speaks about privacy and openness at the same time,\u201d she says. \u201cI like these liminal spaces.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe feeling was that this grief was irreparable,\u201d she says. In her early 20s and living away from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1051289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36,5905,2249,157535,4678],"class_list":["post-1051288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-france","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-france","tag-identity","tag-photography","tag-selects","tag-society"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1051289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}