2 readers; Olivier Facon and Dominique Merigard pointed out an inaccuracy in the text of Christian Rome on Marc Garanger. Christian Rome is mistaken about the fact that Marc Garanger had doubts about the images made during his military service in Algeria including in particular the portraits of “Algerian women”.
Indeed, in the afterword to Femmes algériennes 1960, published by Atlantica in March 2002, Marc Garanger wrote:
“The first exhibition of these photographs took place at the end of 1960, when I aligned the identity photos, drawn in 4 x 4 cm, stapled in six copies, on the captain’s desk, in Aumale ( now Sour El Ghozlane), a few days after the first series of shots. The captain, when he discovered the photographs, stirred up the staff officers with screams: “Come see, come see how ugly they are!” Come see these macaques, they look like monkeys! ” (…)
(…) And night fell in Arles in July 1981, on the Théâtre Antique. The portraits of Algerian women appeared, projected in 8 x 8 meters, in cross fade. I read in silence the handwritten text which appears at the head of this book, and the projection continued on the “you-you” that the women of the Casbah of Algiers pushed in the night during the war to provoke the French army… A hundred giant portraits of Algerian women, then a hundred photos of my twenty-four months of military service, the war seen through the small end of the telescope, by a “private of the contingent ” The spotlights then turned on again, and after a moment of silence which seemed endless to me, the applause of some two thousand spectators of the Theatre Antique burst! It took twenty years for this clamor to rise, for this cry to explode! (…)” – Marc Garanger
The full text is in the French version of L’Oeil de la Photographie.
