In 1929, André Gide published a landmark book, Travels in the Congo, illustrated by 64 photographs by Marc Allégret. This rare, large-format and numbered work, never reissued, was the fruit of ten months spent in Africa a few years beforehand. Today it is deeply coveted by collectors.
Gide was fulfilling a long-held dream: “A young man’s project realized in middle age; this voyage to the Congo, I was barely and I had already promised myself I would do it. That was thirty-six years ago,” he wrote.
The 56-year old Gide finally went to the Congo with Marc Allégret, son of Elie Allégret, a missionary pastor sent to the Congo in 1889 and with whom Gide had originally planned to undertake the journey.
Sent on a mission by the Ministry of Colonies, Gide and his young secretary, Allégret, then 25, left Bordeaux on July 18th, 1925. They followed the Belgian and French Congo, crossing Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), then Chad, Cameroon and what was then called French Equatorial Africa (AEF). They returned to Bordeaux on May 31st, 1926.
Comparing Allégret’s ethnographic photographs with Gide’s text, which took a stand against French colonial policy, is remarkable.
The latest issue of Musée Magazine, Temptation, featuring work by Mona Kuhn, Richard Misrach, Steven Klein, Taryn Simon, Pierre Molinier and Pierre et Gilles, is now on available.
Read the full article on the French version of The Eye
Sophie Malexis
EXHIBITION
Le Voyage au Congo
Marc Allégret & André Gide
From June 21st to August 31st, 2014
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