Simon Wheatley's photos of the banlieues of France in 2005.

In 2005, France suddenly erupted into huge riots in the suburbs after two teenagers died during a police chase. Photographer Simon Wheatley arrived in Paris and soon joined other journalists on a boring media tour. The Magnum agency offered him the chance to visit France's fourth largest residential development, on the outskirts of the picturesque town of Blois. Seeing an opportunity to delve deeper and reveal a truer picture of the mood of the nation, he made several trips to the area on his own and expanded the project that eventually became the book Always and Everywhere Present. He tells Dalia Al-Juraily how he wanted to tell a side of the story that is rarely told, which is to show the "institutionalized marginalization" of France and to throw new light on the often forgotten skewed division of the country's population.

The city of Blois, central France

The Gothic cathedral towers over the city, surrounded by castles filled with exquisite finishes and historic artwork of the late kings, while lush gardens that rival the Garden of Eden stretch along the Loire River. It is a picturesque city that can be described as typically French. But the city of Blois does not reveal France's problematic approach to migrant living, with 20,000 of its 50,000 residents living in France's fourth largest housing estate just a kilometer away.

On October 27, 2005, following the deaths of 17-year-old Zied and 15-year-old Bouna in a police chase, France's suburbs, or banlieues, erupted in protest against systematic police brutality and racism. Simon Wheatley had no intention of staying in France when he was given the assignment to capture the mood of the country characterized by protests against the authorities. He immediately jumped on the train when he learned that no photographer was documenting French housing estates at the time. His book Always and Everywhere Present, published in 2023 (18 years after the photographs were taken), is about a youth pushed to the periphery of French life.

Wheatley photographed Blois and its inhabitants in 2005, after being assigned an assignment by Time magazine (via Magnum). It was a media tour of sorts in Paris, he says. "We saw burned trucks and cars. I took some pictures, but it seemed like a very pointless thing to do. It's almost like travel journalism." After the editorial director of Magnum's Paris office asked Simon to go to Blois, he decided to dive even deeper. He met some youth workers on his first trip and asked them to introduce him to more banlieue youth. "A youth worker met me and said: 'Look, I'll take you there and nothing else, you'll be on your own turf,'" he recalls.

One of the first shots Simon took was of a group of boys in a basement. Particularly memorable is a scene where one boy looks with his extinguished red brake light at a friend on a motorcycle, his face partially illuminated by a romantic light. The young men were "perhaps a little intrigued and enlivened by my presence," Simon recalls. He mostly credits his incapacitating demeanor and sensitivity for the intimacy of the photographs; the frame invites the viewer to participate, as if we would be friends with these boys or have grown up with them.