Review of the Leila Alaoui: Rite of Passage exhibition at Somerset House

The late Leila Alaoui’s work looks back at you. Her subjects’ eyes gaze out and lock with yours from frames and screens made on a much grander scale than the little boxes on Zoom. At the start of November 2020, I went to see an exhibition of her photographs and film at Somerset House, just before the second lockdown came into effect.

I have the place to myself. I can’t avoid my reflection in the shiny black backgrounds of the larger-than-life Les Marocains portraits, and I can’t avoid the eye contact with her interviewees on the enormous TV screen playing L’Île du Diable. They stand almost completely still for long moments at a time, eyes meeting Alaoui’s; but since she is no longer there, they are fixed on ours.

Alaoui was a French-Moroccan photographer, who was born in Paris in 1982, the year before I was born in London. She grew up in Marrakech, then studied photography in New York. Alaoui died in January 2016, aged only 33. At the time of her death, she was on assignment in Burkina Faso’s capital. She was shot multiple times during a terrorist attack, and died in hospital three days later.

Three of Alaoui’s collections are grouped together in Leila Alaoui: Rite of Passage, at Somerset House. They are: No Pasara (“Entry Denied,” 2008), Les Marocains (2010–14) and…