EXTRAMUROS — William Keo

World Press Photo winner (2026) · Finalist, Leica Oskar Barnack Award (2026)

Currently available for pre-order.
Estimated publication date: February 2027

EXTRAMUROS begins in 2016, when William Keo started photographing daily life in his neighbourhood in Seine-Saint-Denis. Over the years he has continuously documented the Paris banlieues, developing a long-term body of work grounded in closeness and commitment.

With a photojournalistic approach, the author looks at the everyday life of residents and takes stock of public services, allowing him to gauge the presence of the State in this department. From hospitals to improvised football tournaments, from police stations to demonstrations and prisons, the project shows a wide diversity of situations and points of view, revealing the tensions between institutions and those they oversee.

The book stands as close as possible to lived experience; it does not seek to simplify reality and takes on its full complexity. Bringing together photographs, texts by researchers and testimonies, EXTRAMUROS offers a reading of a fragmented society on the margins of the capital. Conceived as a passage through the neighbourhoods and structured around recurring cycles of violence, the book explores broader questions of identity, of power relations, and of the social and architectural organisation of the urban periphery.

William Keo was born in France in 1996 into a family of Cambodian refugees. His work addresses questions of migration, social exclusion and intercommunal tension. He came to photography working with NGOs, covering the Syrian refugee crisis, the conflict in Darfur, migration routes in Europe and the Rohingya humanitarian crisis. Since 2019 he has documented the cycles of violence that followed the fall of Daesh in Iraq and Syria, as well as French and international news for the press, notably the conflicts in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine.

He was a member of Magnum Photos from 2021 to 2024. Closer to home, he continues to document the banlieues of Seine-Saint-Denis, where he grew up. His work has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Le Monde, Libération, Vogue and New York Magazine, among others. EXTRAMUROS was distinguished in 2026 with a World Press Photo award.