At first glance, Mayotte – a small island and French territory in the Indian Ocean – looks like a paradise, with its azure seas, white sands, dense, tropical forests and small but growing number of luxury hotels. But Captives of Liberty, a new photography series by Aymane Alhamid, imagines it as a kind of prison, albeit a beautiful one.

Shot on film and hand-printed, the photographs have a timeless quality and stand out for their rich, vibrant colours: “It was so important for me to really make them pop out,” says Alhamid. He created the project in partnership with Julia Daka, a Paris-based architect and the founder of Sadaka, a non-profit which supports young people on the island. “We work a lot with photographers, but also architects and designers,” she says. “The idea is to teach young people various ways of expressing or emancipating themselves through art and design, so they can find new ways of broadening their horizons – which are really closed off when you grow up on an island.” The young people Sadaka works with, she adds, have “have so many qualities: they’re brilliant, there’s so much artistry.”

Daka and Alhamid, who both grew up in the region, met in Paris around six or seven years ago and hit it off right away (“since he was younger than me, I decided to be like, ‘OK, you’re my little brother now’”, says Daka). They visited Mayotte together during Ramadan, when there are a lot of public events taking place during the evening, and cast people they encountered in the streets.

Alhamid had already planned out the themes which make up Captives of Liberty before he began shooting. One of the issues that he wanted to draw attention to is the complicated citizenship status of many of the island’s residents. Mayotte is a French territory, meaning everyone who is born there has French citizenship, but it is only one part of a larger archipelago. There is a lot of migration between these islands, which means that there are people on Mayotte who, despite having lived there for the majority of their lives, are denied citizenship rights or settled status at the moment they turn 18. 

“These people look the same, they have the exact same culture, they can go to school, they can do everything exactly like the other kids, but their lives are really different just because of the paper situation. [Once they turn 18], they can’t get a drivers license, they can’t get jobs, they can’t go to hospital or university, and they risk getting deported. It creates a hierarchy between those that have papers and those that don’t,” says Alhamid.

Many of the young men photographed in the series are among the latter group. One section focuses on their strength and athleticism, which Amaine suggests is the direct result of their exclusion from society. “They are in really good shape,” he says. “It’s like when someone goes to prison. They can't work, they can’t go to school, they can’t do anything except sports.” These men pose on the beach, the sun beating down on their muscles, and the beauty of the scenery behind them takes on a stark, barren quality; there is nothing on the horizon except the ocean.

France, as well as being responsible for these byzantine citizenship problems, routinely neglects the needs of Mayotte and its inhabitants. “France doesn’t really care about or help them. For example, there’s a big problem with the water over there; you can’t use it every day – when I visit my mum we have to stockpile water,” says Alhamid. In 2025, the French government was criticised for a lacklustre response after a cyclone ravaged the island, destroying countless homes and much of its infrastructure. Mayotte is a department of France, with the same administrative status as Paris or Lyon, yet its inhabitants are denied the same rights and services as their counterparts on the mainland. The French government, as journalist Rokhaya Diallo wrote in a 2025 Guardian article, is now working to restrict birthright citizenship and make it harder for children born in Mayotte to secure French nationality.

It is already difficult for most young people to leave, either because they can’t get passports or because few can afford plane travel in a place where 77 per cent live below the poverty line. This insularity has a profound impact on their intimate lives and personal relations, according to Alhamid. “There are a lot of arranged marriages, and a lot of people get married primarily to secure citizenship”, he says. “Mayotte is also a really small island. It’s like if you spend your whole life in the same room, at some point you're going to think, ‘oh, this is the love of my life’ because it’s the only person you’ve been able to know. They do really big and expensive weddings, but at the end of the day, a lot of people don’t love each other.” 

Alhamid’s images evoke an ambiguous sense of romance: in one photograph, a woman swoons back, held in place by her lover, but their expressions are oddly impassive; they could be lost in each other’s gaze or thinking about something else entirely. In another, the same couple are frozen in a slow dance, their faces turned in opposite directions, while a different couple are captured sitting on a sofa and staring directly ahead, their faces blank and their bodies rigid. Alhamid does not beat you over the head with his sociopolitical message, but these images convey the kind of loneliness which can only be experienced with another person. “You’re a captive of the island, then you’re captive of a relationship, then you’re captive of a love that you didn’t choose,” says Daka. “With Sadaka, I wanted to bring the outside world back there, and give a voice to the voiceless.”