"H est un livre sec et tranchant à la douceur des oueds oubliés, qu’on s’approprie à force d’écoutes. Un temps où murmurent les ombres qui passent étrangement dans cet outre monde, un objet de l’éblouissement plus que de l’irradiation."
“H is a dry, sharp-edged book, softened by the gentleness of forgotten wadis, a book one gradually makes one’s own through repeated listening. A time in which shadows murmur as they pass strangely through this otherworld, an object of dazzling light rather than irradiation.”
“When the bomb exploded, when the sky lit up, I felt pierced through, as if through a sheet of ice, through a glass of water… me… I saw all of myself inside.”
Testimony — Vents de sable (Larbi Benchiha)
How could I have known that, after these three journeys, I too would see all of myself inside? I no longer remember the exact moment when something shifted, somewhere deep within me, when I understood that I had not travelled those 3,000 kilometres simply to speak about them.
On an impulse, two years ago, I suddenly decided I was a photographer and set off for the middle of the Sahara, to Reggane, a place almost no one goes. “Why are you going there? There’s nothing there but irradiated people.” My first conversation over coffee in Algiers before catching my connection, my first inward smile. Yes, I want to photograph the irradiated people of Reggane. I want to meet the spectres in the desert. Twenty-four hours later, I am wandering through the scorching streets of Algeria’s Triangle of Fire, and through the people I meet I slowly begin to understand that the ghosts I came looking for will not reveal themselves to my gaze.
Obviously.
They tell me about the atomic mushroom cloud as though it were a rainbow appearing in the middle of the night over the desert. They tell me about the Gerboise Bleue bomb, because of which there are no more gerboises in the area, and about that light piercing through walls and souls. And yet the only blur that appears before me, the only unsettled, trembling, translucent figure I encounter, is myself. They are whole. They know what they are doing there. And I am one of the countless ghosts of the seventeen French nuclear tests, sixty years later. This book does not speak only about them. It raises a question I had never even thought to ask myself:
Why…
Why did I feel such an absolute urgency to photograph life at ground zero of the atomic explosions? Why did I, the son and grandson of French servicemen who lived in Algiers until the war, travel there sixty years later, when Algeria had been spoken about so little in my family, and when I only became aware of my connection to that land much later in life? Why express all of this through images when I am a musician, an oud player? And why burden this book with a silent consonant, this H… barely a breath.
I return to Reggane four months later, and finally to Tamanrasset, towards In Ekker. Altogether, I spend only twenty days there, over three brief journeys during which I come face to face with my fears and my solitude. I photograph constantly: in buses and shared taxis, in my room, through sleepless nights, these men and women I meet, who tell me their stories…
The blast of those explosions still dances inside me and sings through the H of haunted, the H of the bomb, and the H of heredity, in a game of hide-and-seek between that blinding light and my silent inheritance. This book is a distorting mirror, and where I never imagined I would find words, I found my first images.
Saturne Editions
112 pages
offset print / 23x15.9 cm
Hardcover binding, foil stamping and white ink
Printed on Arctic Volume Ivory 150 gsm paper
Printed by Escourbiac
