JPM is a posthumous collaboration with my late Algerian father, who passed away unexpectedly in Toulouse, France, in February 2022. He always existed at a distance. I knew little about his dreams, struggles, and victories.

With this book, I sublimate his life from 1950s war-torn Algiers to the Agence France Presse Paris HQ, at the pinnacle of his photojournalist career in the late 2000s.

When I reentered his house in July 2022, it resembled a landfill. His photographic archive was no different. I worked like an editor on a deadline would, unafraid to make radical choices. Relationships started to form between bodies of work. They were free, fluid, and radiant. The archive attained a life of its own.

To escape the drudgery of packing his house, I walked and photographed the Toulouse neighborhoods where he lived and passed, taking pictures while pondering transgenerational trauma, time, photography, and fractured roots.

All the pictures I cataloged, scanned, made, and incorporated in this project are asymptotic. Conclusions will remain latent. Perhaps light truly is the best disinfectant.