Born at the same time as the colonial conquest, photography has always accompanied Algeria. This exhibition is however not a history of Algeria by the image. It aims to highlight some of the views that have been applied together or successively to this country.

This unprecedented exhibition starts from the simple observation that one does not photograph in the same way according to who one is 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 a means of reading a historical and social context.
There is far from the colonial gaze building an orientalist vision, the meticulous gaze of the ethnographic investigation of Thérèse Rivière who went on a mission in the Aurès with Germaine Tillion, the empathetic reaction of a Pierre Bourdieu who discovered his vocation as a sociologist through spontaneous images taken in Algeria between 1958 and 1961, or the forced clichés of Algerian women captured by Marc Garanger, called from the contingent commissioned to make identity photographs of the population . We will find Marc Riboud’s photos during the crazy days of Independence, which are answered by the shots of Mohamed Kouaci, the only Algerian photographer to cover the period, from Tunis first, then from Algeria itself. The exhibition also opens to the contemporary period through the photos of Bruno Boudjelal discovering his father’s country during the black decade or the images of Algiers on a palette of Karim Kal ready to be taken with him.
All the information on the IMA-Tourcoing website