Among the string of small-format exhibitions that dot the rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art (MNAM), one particularly attracts attention. Because of its 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 the Franco-Algerian artist Katia Kameli The Bourdieu Inquiry. The ricochet of imagesjust completed. 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 reissue for the occasion of the book Images from Algeria. An elective affinity (Actes Sud/Sindbad/Camera Austria, 2024).
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The history of these photos is in episodes. First a soldier called to Algeria in 1955, the young associate professor of philosophy remained there as an assistant at the faculty of Algiers, and then engaged in the discipline that he subsequently greatly contributed to reform, sociology. In the villages of Kabylia, in the streets of Algiers and Blida, in the “regroupment camps” where the French army displaces the village populations, Bourdieu watches and, to see better, photographs with a Zeiss Ikoflex 6 camera × 6 purchased in Germany and, by his own admission“smuggled”. 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 there are therefore prints whose negatives have disappeared. We have everything there is. »
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