“As a child, I was captivated by the phantasmagoric imagination that overflowed with my parents’ family album. I really liked to immerse myself in it in my spare time, especially during their nap time. I told myself then a bunch of fictionalized stories, inspired by Egyptian films then broadcast on Lebanese TV. Later, I left Lebanon with only one photo in my suitcase: that of my boyfriend in a swimsuit, smiling at me on the beach. My family photos, the need to (a) see them here at my home in France, came much later. I won’t be able to say when exactly. But for a few years, I noticed that my mother gave them to me more. more readily with each passage in Lebanon. So I wondered if the advancing age, my mother did not seek to bequeath to me via these photos, a family memory made precisely to be transmitted and enriched from ascending to descending. if, as in a handover of family jewels, she does not It was not unconscious to leave them one day in my turn to my nieces and nephews, for lack of having children myself. ” R.S.

“From a certain number of years after death, the face does not change. The sharpness of the features, the fire of the pupils, the shine of the gaze remain. Time is conquered. The loved one is there, in front of us, in photo, and will be forever. Shrouded in an eternal aura. Wear no longer has any hold on him. His portrait is no longer just a portrait: he is the disappeared being himself “Inaccessible to time henceforth. Untouchable. Untouchable. Alive. And so in the centuries of centuries.”

Of all of them what is left at the end? Some pictures. A portrait that we pass on to each other, that we emerge from time to time to show the grandchildren and great grandchildren who Uncle Pierre was, who was Grandma of Oran. “S.P.