At the heart of Nina Medioni’s (b. 1991) photographic practice lie encounters and the passage of time. The photographer explores places that are sometimes linked to her personal history, sometimes unknown. In her surveying, the camera becomes an instrument: a vessel for recording what the territory traverses. Often, she chooses the summer season—expanded, devoid of apparent events, indolent. The event, then—the one through which the image comes into being—is the encounter. To bring it about, there is the presence of the camera and speech, both unusual in these environments. It is therefore no surprise that her photographic projects often feature sequences of images, portraits, and gestures captured within the same space-time. None of the portraits from the same shoot takes precedence over the others, she tells us. She places them on the page, careful not to cut them off; it is then up to us to read the transcription of the words exchanged with this young boy from Prépaou, a small residential town in the south of France. Recently, she has been working in Israel, *Le Voile* (2019–2022), a large-scale photographic project. In it, she explores a distant, unfamiliar part of her family history and seeks, through photography and portraiture, to forge a connection that has hitherto been nonexistent. The camera thus becomes a liminal space, where she attempts to encounter members of a branch of her family she does not know, belonging to an Orthodox Jewish community. The photographic image here documents the attempt at encounter, the fleeting success, or the failure. The photographic frame thus embodies the threshold upon which the photographer and the subjects stand. More recently, she created *Le Chalet* (2022), a short film about a mysterious house in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, inhabited by her uncle. Encounters with the neighborhood’s residents—young and old—and brief or repeated dialogues bring into focus the outline of a “chalet” situated on the boulevard, which she takes care to always leave in the background. In Nina Medioni’s work, the photographer’s act of capturing an image and the subject’s act of speaking are undeniably intertwined.
