Picture essay: Camille Farrah Lenain’s Made Of Smokeless Fire

The photographer’s new monograph is a love letter to her late uncle and a shifting illustration of the Muslim LGBTQI+ neighborhood in France

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In 2013 Camille Farrah Lenain’s Uncle Farid handed away. The French-Algerian photographer’s eventual response was to show her lens on the broader French Muslim LGBTQI+ neighborhood. The ensuing work, created between 2020 to 2025, is collected in her first monograph Made of Smokeless Fire. 

In a dedication on the finish of the e book, Lenain writes: “This is a love letter to you, Uncle Farid. And here are the questions I was never able to ask you: Did you ever believe in Allah? Did you ever try to come out to your parents? How did the news feel, in your body, when you were diagnosed with HIV? Were you able to feel fully queer, and fully Arab, in France?”

Speaking of her uncle’s affect on the photographs, Lenain says: “I never intended to make a long-term collective project. I just started by wanting to talk to my family about him. I think, at first, I met a little bit of resistance. It was hard to speak about him. His death was still recent. And honestly, even today it’s still difficult to talk about, even though it’s been 13 years.”

The photos in Made of Smokeless Fire are tender and intently noticed. They transfer between particular person portraits and moments of intimacy between {couples}. In one one shot, a determine seems on the lens by way of a mirror, a pink embroidered scarf draped over their head. In one other, tendrils of smoke float round a lady’s face, a cigarette in her hand.

This motif of smoke runs all through, calling our consideration again to the e book’s title, which is taken from the Qur’an’s description of the jinn: “He created humankind from sounding clay like pottery, and created jinn from a smokeless flame of fire.” (55:14–15) 

“Jinn exist inbetween,” says Lenain. “They’re neither good nor bad. You can’t really put them into a box.” Now residing between New Orleans and New York, Lenain’s expertise of rising up in France is deeply necessary to the mission. She created the work in a number of areas, together with Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and Lyon. 

France has the best variety of Muslims in Europe, with estimates suggesting Muslims make up 10% of the population. Recent experiences point out that in 2025 violence in opposition to Muslims surged by 88%.

For Lenain, the mission “speaks very directly to Islamophobia and racism” within the nation. “It’s about how to love in the face of hate,” she says. “When hate comes from all directions. When it comes from your religion. When it comes from your family. When it comes from your country. Your workplace. Your society. Your immigration status. Your faith. Your asylum process. All of those things.” 

She is conscious of pictures’s energy to doc individuals, particularly a neighborhood that’s usually marginalised in each queer and Muslim areas. Although she doesn’t communicate outright about colonialism in her description of the mission, she believes that interrogating her personal intentions when photographing is necessary. 

“I think I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about photography as a historically oppressive tool. Photography as a one-sided gaze,” she says. “Photography as something that can, at the end of the day, be dangerous.” 

Lenain is, nevertheless, hopeful about what pictures can provide. “We talk a lot about reparations. And of course reparations matter. But I also think we can practise small acts of repair all the time. Maybe having a really tender and empathetic approach to photography is one of those acts. ” 

Although the mission started with questions Lenain wished she might ask her uncle, it turned marked by one other loss. She additionally dedicates the e book to a good friend, Lamine, whose {photograph} seems on the finish of the e book after a dedication. 

In the picture, light and shifting in its composition, Lamine locations a kiss on the again of a white pigeon. “I think grief and love can make ordinary things feel charged,” Lenain says, “So I became really obsessed with birds. Partly because Lamine loved them and partly because it felt like a way of carrying something forward.”

Most of all, Lenain hopes that the message of Made of Smokeless Fire is one among love. “That’s really what the book is about,” she says “Love for God. Love for the people you were told you weren’t allowed to love. Love for yourself. And I think it’s about survival. Love as survival.”

Made of Smokeless Fire by Camille Farrah Lenain is printed by Loose Joints.