By Saisha, Nathanaël, and Andrew
During the French colonization of Algeria, photography was used at an unprecedented scale as a form of domination over Algerian women, strengthening the colonizer’s power over the colonized. French army draftee Marc Garanger’s photographic essay Algerian Women serves as an example of the use of photography to establish colonial dominion (Garanger 1960). Ordered by his commander to create an identification system of citizens of colonized villages, Garanger captured countless pictures of Algerian women who had recently been forced into concentration camps, the result of a traumatic Algerian War fought in the 1950s and 1960s. Photography could hence be used as a tool of colonial control.
Beyond this, however, photography came to be understood by colonial administrators as a way to address the “roots” of resistance to colonial power. Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, who came to play an instrumental role in the colonization of the country and later occupied the position of general governor, noted in the early years of the colonization of Algeria that “the Arabs are escaping us because they hide their women from our sights” (Smith and Armengaud 2006, 25-40). Such a perspective was of yet uncommon: writings from colonial administrators in the 1830s show that there was a greater concern for “political Islam,” perceived as the essence of Algerian identity and the source of their rebellion and resistance (Smith and Armengaud 2006, 25-40). In the 1870s however, as military authority gradually winded down, colonial discourse shifted to focus on the perceived cultural and moral superiority of the colonial power. Islam was understood as a rigid institution ruling over familial and sociosexual relations, putting in place rules that subjected women to great oppression (Vatin and Lucas 1982). The veil, a common adornment for women in many Muslim-majority societies such as colonial Algeria, became the center of a perceived clash of gender roles between the Algerian and French society (Seferdjeli 2018). The Muslim woman was used as a “negative symbol,” a proof of French cultural dominance that justified its colonial rule and the necessity of its civilizing mission in Algeria while denying its people political rights (Smith and Armengaud 2006, 25-40). Removing the veil, as Frantz Fanon describes in his work, was becoming a prerequisite to colonial domination. The destruction of the “structure of Algerian society” required the “conquer [of] the woman”: it was necessary to “find them behind the veil” (Fanon 1972).
In The Colonial Harem, Algerian writer Malek Alloula argues that the use of photography in Algeria was a manifestation of colonial violence, through which the photographer achieved his voyeuristic pleasures of seeing the women without their veil (Alloula 1986). Alloula studied several hundreds of postcards, sent between the early 1900s to the mid-20th century, which circulated pictures taken by French photographers of Algerian women, unveiled and given various props and costumes. The study of these postcards reveals a common thread to each photograph: the photographer’s desire to possess and control the subject of the image, rendering the women powerless and without agency. Through the intentional staging of the women in the studio, the photographer fulfills a particular phantasm prominent in France at the time, but also comes to produce a convenient stereotype of oriental women that aids in the conquering of Algerian society.
The colonial desire in the French photography of Algerian women is representative of the concept of Orientalism, in which colonizers’ documentations of the colonized are representations, instead of “natural depictions of the Orient” (Said 1978, 21). This is because the images are filtered through the colonizer’s gaze — they do not represent the Algerian women themselves, but rather the French men’s idea of the “Oriental female,” seen as exotic, vulnerable, and weak. The photography itself is inherently a form of colonialism, stripping the subject of all power.
The French thus weaponized the veiling of Algerian women as an excuse to colonize, effectively arguing that unveiling liberated women and freed them from “traditional” understandings of gender roles (Seferdjeli 2018). Reminiscent of the work of Antonio Gramsci and cultural hegemony, such argumentation is thematic across other instances of colonialism and has become encapsulated by the term “colonial feminism,” which consists of veiling inhumane colonial intentions under a “humanitarian” guise (Young 2003, 97).
Beyond the photograph, the specific medium of the postcard carries with it implications for the colonial power dynamic in Algeria. Termed by Alloula as the “fertilizer of the colonial vision,” the postcard is the exact representation of “travel” and “expedition,” that, when weaponized, becomes the basis for colonial domination (Alloula 1986, 4). It reminds recipients of the ideals of exploration and nature, compounded with the obsession of the French with the Algerian woman (Alloula 1986, 4). Furthermore, the postcard medium empowers the colonizer to access the Orientalized form of the Algerian woman subject with permanence and ease that is unsettling, weaponizing a “realistic” art form in photography to smear the image of these women to fit the French gaze.
The use of photography as studied in the corpus The Colonial Harem also demonstrates subtle forms of resistance to colonial domination. For instance, the veil women would wear in these photographs was often colored white. This whiteness helped to “invisibilize” the woman, symbolizing through the “blindness,” as Alloula describes it, the way these photographs dehumanized Algerian women by rendering it difficult to differentiate one from another (Alloula 1965, 7). At the same time, white veils also served to resist the view of the camera — while it could sometimes capture the outline of a woman, it could not grasp the specific details and features that were the object of the French phantasm (Alloula 1986, 5).
The ubiquity of photography used as a colonizing technology by the French serves as an important reminder of the multidimensionality of colonization. The prerogative of the colonized in every instance to define their own identity and narrative from the bottom up is not simply about the words they speak or the text they write — it is also about the pictures taken on their behalf. When said depiction is controlled by an outside party with perverse (colonial, sexualized) interests, the colonized are helpless to speak up, and the colonizer is free to co-opt a superficially “realistic” technology and turn it into a technology of rule.
At which point, the colonized are spoken over.
(Alloula 1986, 9)
“Typical image of an Algerian woman on a postcard” (Alloula 1986, 15)
(Alloula 1986, 19)
(Alloula 1986, 126)
Works Cited
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Clancy Smith, Julia, and Françoise Armengaud. “Le Regard Colonial : Islam, Genre Et Identités Dans La Fabrication De l’Algérie Française, 1830-1962.” Nouvelles Questions Féministes Vol. 25, no. 1 (2006): 25–40. https://doi.org/10.3917/nqf.251.0025.
Fanon, Frantz. Sociologie D’une Revolution. Paris: F. Maspero, 1972.
Naggar, Carole. “Women Unveiled: Marc Garanger’s Contested Portraits of 1960s Algeria.” Time, April 23, 2013. https://time.com/69351/women-unveiled-marc-garangers-contested-portraits-of-1960s-algeria/.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978. p.21
“The Veil in Colonial Algeria: The Politics of Unveiling Women.” The Funambulist Magazine, March 24, 2022. https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/15-clothing-politics/the-veil-in-colonial-algeria-the-politics-of-unveiling-women-by-ryme-seferdjeli.
Vatin, Jean-Claude, and Pierre Lucas. L’Algérie Des Anthropologues. Paris: Maspero, 1982.
Young, Robert. Post-Colonialism. Oxford: University, 2003. p.97