Aya Chriki

A Book That Doesn’t Say What I Wanted to Say, 2025

This photobook reflects on my intimate relationship with photography, which began very early with a small pink Samsung camera and a spontaneous practice made of everyday images, collages, and family projections. From a young age, photography established itself as a natural, joyful, and instinctive gesture, before gradually becoming a more constructed language through my studies in cinema, visual arts, and photography.

Over time, the practice became structured around research, projects, and conceptual frameworks related to identity, exile, and displacement. Yet this book marks a rupture: it emerges from a need to free myself from the themes linked to my own trajectory and choices—including those I have developed myself—in order to return to a more instinctive and open practice, and to try to answer a simple question: why did I start taking photographs in the first place?

This project is a free exploration of the photographic act, without a predefined concept, guided by the pleasure of seeing, framing, and feeling. It brings together images chosen for their spontaneity, their light, their colours, or their fragments of the world. A book conceived as a return to essentials: the initial sense of wonder before images and the love of photography as a primary language.

A book co-produced by Mohamed Abo Gabal and Rizo Masr.

2025.