“I'd been separated from Tunisia for so long, I wanted to go back to these places that I kept dreaming and thinking of,” says Montreal-based photographer Oumayma Ben Tanfous of the genesis behind her debut photobook, ‘Between I and Lands’. “It was very therapeutic – and quite a difficult project, honestly, very emotional. But the entire concept was just to go back to these places and see what I could find.”

She recorded what she found back in her homeland both with her camera and through poetic journal entries – each line in English and Arabic. These texts make the work even more intensely personal; it feels as though not only is she taking the reader to her home as a guest, she’s letting them in on her inner life, too. With sentiment spilling from every page, it’s the texts that turn something so visually Tunisian into a universal musing on loss, grief and memory.

Ben Tanfous grew up in Tunis and left for Montreal in 2001 with her family, who – because of a lack of papers – were unable to leave Canada for eight years. Her parents also parted ways in Canada. This dramatic and lengthy separation from home was compounded by the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab fervour that gripped the west following the 9/11 attacks. “When I was finally able to go back 10 years later, it was the same time as my grandfather passed away, as well as the revolution. So, it was very chaotic and since then, I’ve tried to avoid returning because it was too difficult. Going back meant confronting the absence of my father, the rupture from the family and the fact that I don’t understand the country anymore because I’ve lost my two grandparents.”

The feeling of severing from her homeland in such dramatic circumstances understandably led to a severing of self and identity. Happily, this project brought her back, not only to Tunisia but to herself, too. “As a teenager, I would avoid anything that was related to my identity. Now I understand a lot of things that I was avoiding. I was also doing therapy while making the book and I reconnected with my father in Tunisia, after 20 years.”

Naturally, the physical journey of shooting for the book was ripe with adventures, discoveries and tensions as she retraced her family’s history through Tunis, Djerba, Kerkennah and beyond. “It was a really special time. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get a great photograph but would have beautiful encounters and conversations with the people who lived there,” she recalls of her road trip through the islands. “And there were other times I was by myself, trying to reconnect with the land, so it was a lot of mixed emotions. But by the end, I was really proud of myself for confronting what I had tried to avoid for so long and I hope to build my community there in future.”

Ben Tanfous began working on the project in 2022 but it changed shape over time thanks largely to art historian, writer and curator, Taous Dahmani, who convinced her to create from the heart. “During our first conversation, I shared the project in quite a rational way, trying to think about environmental issues in Tunisia. Taous told me, ‘You need to confront your feelings, do the work and write about your images.’” She did just that and

now, there’s a letter in the book from Dahmani that honours their friendship and mutual respect. “She was like this angel that helped guide me all along. We instantly had a deep conversation and she asked right questions to let me trust her and open up.”

Having made her name in community-driven fashion photography and been featured in magazines such as Vogue, Document Journal and Dazed, Ben Tanfous is keen to focus more on documentary photography. The artist is now relocating to Europe for a few months to allow her to travel easily to Tunisia and create more personal projects. We can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds.