This first exhibition of a year largely devoted to photography at IMA-Tourcoing will bring together a hundred photos from the beginning of the 20th century until 2002.
Born at the same time as the colonial conquest, photography has always accompanied Algeria. This exhibition is however not the story of Algeria through photography. It aims to highlight some of the eyes that applied themselves together or successively to this country.
This hitherto unseen exhibition starts from the simple observation that we do not photograph in the same way according to who we are and according to the destination of the images. It will reflect on the nature of the image as a medium of contact between different worlds and means of reading a historical and social context.
It is far from the colonial eye building an orientalist vision, the minutious scrutiny of the ethnographic investigation of Thérèse Rivière who went on a mission in the Aurès with Germaine Tillion, the empathic reaction of a Pierre Bourdieu discovering through images taken spontaneously in Algeria between 1958 and 1961 his vocation as a sociologist, or the forced portraits of Algerian women taken by Marc Garanger, called to service in the army , and missioned to make identity pictures of the population. Marc Riboud‘s photos on the crazy days before and during Independence, to which answer the pictures of Mohamed Kouaci, the only Algerian photographer covering the period, first from Tunis, then from Algeria itself. The exhibition also opens to the contemporary period through photos of Bruno Boudjelal discovering the country of his father during the dark decade or images of Algiers on a palette of Karim Kal ready to be taken away.
Photographing Algeria
February 28> July 13, 2019
Institute of the Arab World of Tourcoing
9 Rue Gabriel Péri
59200 Tourcoing
