An intimate portrait of queer Muslim life in France, where faith and desire intersect within conditions of erasure.

Camille Farrah Lenain’s Made of Smokeless Fire weaves the personal and the political to explore the layered nature of LGBTQ+ identity as it unfolds in the shadow of dislocation, erasure, and marginalisation. Set in France, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in Europe, and marked by pervasive Islamophobia in which queer Muslim lives are often rendered invisible, Lenain counters erasure through a deeply attentive and relational photographic approach.

The work began as testimony and homage in the wake of the death of her uncle who grew up gay in a Muslim Algerian family, opening outward from personal loss into a collective portrait of community. The individuals pictured navigate complex terrain, some distanced from family, others reinterpreting cultural inheritance, many forging networks of safety and affirmation, as they negotiate life within overlapping pressures of Islamophobia and queerphobia. 

Gathering colour-heavy, dreamlike scenes that feel tender yet slightly dislocated, Lenain imbues her subjects in warm mediterranean light, revealing the layered nature of their identities. Portraits, gestures and domestic fragments are drawn into a soft, cinematic register, attuned to touch, atmosphere and emotional proximity, where interior life takes precedence over explanation.

Lenain’s title Made of Smokeless Fire draws on the figure of the djinn in Islamic mythology, described as beings made of “smokeless fire” and understood as neither inherently good nor bad. In Lenain’s hands, the djinn becomes a metaphor for queer Muslim experience, often stigmatised or pathologised, here reclaimed as a site of ambiguity, strength and self-definition. Made of Smokeless Fire unfolds as both memorial and act of repair, honouring lives that have remained unspoken or sidelined across generations – lush, radical and attentive all at the same time.

• Camille Farrah Lenain (b. 1990) is a French-Algerian photographer based between New Orleans and New York. Her work explores questions of identity, memory, and belonging, using portraiture, immersive research, and sound to amplify voices often overlooked or misunderstood. Lenain studied photography at l’ESA in Brussels and the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Arab World Institute, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and Photoville. In 2024, she was awarded the Arnold Newman Prize, the Leica Women Foto Prize (U.S.), and was selected for the Aperture Creators Lab. She teaches photography at Tulane University and has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center and the Center of Photography at Woodstock.

• 170 x 240 mm, 128 pages, 60 colour plates
• Section-sewn OTA-bound
  debossed softcover
  
  
• Text by Fatima Daas in English, French and Arabic
  Edited by the artist & Sarah Chaplin Espenon
  Designed by Loose Joints Studio
  
  
• LJ223, June 2026
• ISBN 978-1-912719-76-1

• Pre-order now and save 10% OFF! Limited to the first 100 copies.