The world that Leila Alaoui, 33, devoted her life to photographing returned her love in an emotive series of on-line tributes when it became know that she had succumbed to the injuries she incurred in last Friday’s Islamic State attack against a luxury hotel in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou.
The death of the distinguished French-Moroccan photographer was announced by France’s Culture Minister, Fleur Pellerin, in a Tweet.
Bouleversée que #LeilaAlaoui [1], jeune et talentueuse photographe franco-marocaine, ait succombé ce soir à ses blessures à Ouagadougou.
— Fleur Pellerin (@fleurpellerin) January 18, 2016 [2]
“Saddened that #LeilaAlaoui, the young and talented French-Moroccan photographer, succumbed to her injuries this evening in Ouagadougou,” she wrote.
The writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, also a French Moroccan, posted on his blog that Alaoui was “a passionate artist who knew how to detect reality behind appearances, how to show the splendor of a body behind the veil of prejudice”.
In a joint statement, Jean-Luc Monterosso from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and Jack Lang, the former French culture minister, wrote that Alaoui was a champion of the dispossessed.
Dan Bilefsky of The New York Times wrote: “She was fighting to give life to those forgotten by society, to homeless people, to migrants, deploying one weapon: photography.”
3.