Rémi Ochlik on the Arab Revolution: ‘We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire’

At the age of 28, Award-winning French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik was already a seasoned photojournalist.

He had gone to Haiti and Sierra Leone, and he was committed to covering the Arab uprising.

From Tunisia, he went on to Libya, Egypt, and then Syria.

On February 21st, 2012, he arrived in Homs late at night, as the city was under heavy shelling.

He reached a house which had been improvised as an underground media center in the besieged neighborhood of Baba Amr.

A few other Western journalists were there, including American reporter Marie Colvin.

Here is Ochlik that night, surrounded by Syrian rebel fighters.

French Photojournalist Rémi Ochlik with Syrian Army Fighters one day before his death in Homs, Syria. (Photo: WikiCommons)

The very next morning, the house came under rocket fire.

Colvin and Ochlik did not make it out of the house in time.

They were killed by a rocket explosion as they were trying to escape.

Ochlik’s photographs of the Arab Spring have been collected into a book titled “Révolutions.”

It was published by Karim Ben Khelifa, a Belgo-Tunisian photojournalist who was a friend and colleague of Ochlik’s.

He runs a crowd-funding platform for visual journalism called Emphasis, which published Ochlik’s book.

The subheading for “Révolutions” is a phrase in Latin: “In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni”

It’s a well-known a palindrome.

It means: “We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire.”

Rémi Ochlik posted that phrase on his Facebook page at the beginning of the Tunisian revolution.

His friend photographer Arnaud Brunet says Ochlik had a hunch very early on that this rebellion was going to reverberate across the Arab world.