Among the series of small-format exhibitions that scatter the rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art (MNAM), one particularly attracts attention. Because of the subject – Algeria photographed between 1957 and 1961, the war years – and the author of the images, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002); and the screening of the film by French-Algerian artist Katia Kameli Bourdieu’s investigation. The ricochet of imagesjust finished To which is added the presence of part of the observation and analysis sheets written by Bourdieu during this period, inseparable from his images, and the re-editing on the occasion of the book. Images from Algeria. An elective affinity (Actes Sud/Sindbad/Camera Austria, 2024).
The history of these photos is in episodes. First a soldier called to Algeria in 1955, the young associate professor of philosophy stayed there as an assistant at the faculty of Algiers, and then engaged in the discipline he later contributed greatly to reform, sociology. In the villages of Kabylia, on the streets of Algiers and Blida, in “regroupment camps” where the French army displaces the populations of the villages, Bourdieu watches and, to see better, photographs with a Zeiss Ikoflex 6 camera x 6 purchased in Germany and, by his own admission“contraband”. Florian Ebner, head of the MNAM photography office and curator of the exhibition, estimates that Bourdieu returned to France with around 3,000 negatives: “Part of it was lost, probably during moves, and so there are prints whose negatives have disappeared. We have everything there is. »
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