Take a look at this photograph.
Three women sit on a rug on the floor. All of them wear ‘traditional’ clothing, flowers in their hair and a head covering. Their shoes are placed on the rug in front of them. The room is tiled and draped with patterned textiles. There is a window covered with a metal grille and a carved wooden door is open behind them. A hookah sits on an inlaid wooden side-table. One woman meets the photographer’s eye.
This photo is one of hundreds taken by French photographers in Algeria** under French occupation, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Most of them exhibit an ethnographic quality, enhanced by the tendency of the caption to classify or identify ‘types’ (this one reads Femme arabes or Arab Women).
As a spectator of the photographs (divorced from their historical and/or geographical and cultural context) one may well assume that images such as these, are historical traces, windows into the Algeria of the past and Algerian home life. In reality, the photo is staged, the women are all models in costume sitting in a studio, and everything in the image has been deliberately chosen, placed and framed by the photographer (why would the women have removed their shoes only to then place them on the rug?). It is a carefully crafted representation of an Algeria, and more specifically, the Algérienne, that in reality, never existed. It is a phantasm, the colonial master’s fantasy.
The Colonial Photographer
In 1830, French troops entered the city of Algiers, marking the beginning of what was to become 132 years of French colonial rule over Algeria. The period was marked by the violent suppression (“pacification campaign”) of popular Algerian resistance against French occupation and the settlement of colons (French and European settlers) in the country. The Algerian War of Independence finally brought French rule to an end in 1962.
French colonial rule (likewise the rule of the other European colonial powers in Africa and Asia), saw not only the arrival of soldiers on newly claimed territories, but along with them, scientists, writers and photographers. As has been shown elsewhere, photography was an important tool in the justification of colonialism. Hired by colonial regimes or publications, photographers produced images that served a number of purposes, including scientific (ethnographic photography), religious (missionary work), entertainment (postcards produced for tourists) and propaganda (though all of the aforementioned also ultimately served propaganda purposes), to bolster support for the colonial project at home.
Here, our primary concern is with photographs taken in Algeria between 1900 and 1930, and printed as tourist postcards to be sold and distributed in the metropole, France. All of the images (and indeed, many of the observations) in this essay are taken from “The Colonial Harem”, an indispensable study on the eroticised representations of Algerian women, carried out by poet and literary critic Malek Alloula. Outlining the motives behind his work, Alloula states:
“A reading of the sort I propose to undertake would be entirely superfluous if there existed photographic traces of the gaze of the colonized upon the colonizer. In their absence, that is, in the absence of a confrontation of opposed gazes, I attempt here, lagging far behind History, to return this immense postcard to its sender.” 1
An Image of the East
“Although the Orientalist photograph is born of an archaeological urge for documentary evidence and a classificatory desire for empirical knowledge, its content ultimately reveals a projected fantasy of the Middle East and its people.”2
Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis
By the time photography was invented, an image of the ‘East’ had long existed in the European imagination through literature and the arts. That image was made up primarily of negative stereotypes that portrayed “Orientals” as the exotic Other, inferior intellectually and culturally to their ‘enlightened’ European counterparts. Far from confronting and challenging those notions, the camera merely served as a tool to cement them further- with the added perception of ‘realism’ that allowed photographs to be received as ‘objective fact’.3
In representing women specifically, the pre-existing visual reference point for photographers, existed in the form of ‘harem’ paintings that depicted Middle Eastern women as both passive and sexually available. As we shall see, this is what the French colonial photographer in Algeria (and elsewhere), sought to recreate with his camera.
This essay will show that the colonial photographer was not an impartial observer in Algeria; his presence in a colonised land was not incidental, nor innocent. Despite the attempt of some art historians to downplay his role in a wider political and ideological agenda,4 choosing instead to highlight the ‘aesthetic value’ of his work, the deliberate staging of the photographs and what they are ostensibly intended to imply about the women (and country) being represented, make any superficial readings of the images not only difficult, but untenable.
Unveiling the Algerienne
“History knowns of no other society in which women have been photographed on such a large scale to be delivered to public view.”5
Malek Alloula
Upon arrival on Algerian soil, the French photographer faced a problem he was unaccustomed to. He quickly discovered that not only was Algerian home life inaccessible to him, worse still, the Algérienne, even in public, was concealed from his gaze by virtue of the veil.
As Alloula asserts, “These veiled women are not only an embarrassing enigma to the photographer but an outright attack upon him. It must be believed that the feminine gaze that filters through the veil is a gaze of a particular kind: concentrated by the tiny orifice for the eye, this womanly gaze is a little like the eye of a camera, like the photographic lens that takes aim at everything.”6
It is a reversal of roles, and positions of power, “The photographer makes no mistake about it: he knows this gaze well; it resembles his own when it is extended by the dark chamber or the viewfinder. Thrust in the presence of a veiled women, the photographer feels photographed; having himself become an object-to-be-seen, he loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze.
And so, “The photographer will respond to this quiet and almost natural challenge by means of a double violation: he will unveil the veiled and give figural representation to the forbidden.”7
If the Algérienne is not willing to reveal herself, the photographer will ‘create’ her instead according to his own needs, thus taking “symbolic revenge upon a society that continues to deny him any access and questions the legitimacy of his desire.”8 Hiring women from the margins of society, in his studio, fully adorned for purpose, the photographer can finally satisfy his desire.
”Beautiful Fatma” 
“Beautiful Fathmah”
In high contrast to the ‘public’ clothing worn by women in Algeria, here, they are dressed in embroidered garments and adorned with jewellery. Their faces are no longer veiled, and head coverings, where worn, allow some hair to be seen.
The interiors in which the women are placed are decorated with textiles, carpets and cushions, while backdrops are painted to show pillars and arches. An inlaid coffee table makes a regular appearance, either with a tray of coffee and cups placed upon it, or a hookah. Both imply an atmosphere of leisure and inactivity.
In spite of this, bars on windows, found on numerous postcards, still relay the sense that the Algérienne is imprisoned in her own home.
Despite this deliberate staging, the postcards are usually captioned as though documenting Algerian home life: “Arab woman in her quarters.”
“Beautiful Fatmah.” 
“Arab woman in her quarters.”
While some postcards attempt to keep up the pretence, their “ethnographic alibi” starts to unravel when the same model is used to ‘represent’ two different geographical regions. The three photos below are of the same model, wearing the same outfit, but the captions represent her as different women: “Young Beduin Woman,” “Young Woman from the South,” and “Young Kabyl Woman.”9
Meanwhile “Beautiful Fatma” reoccurs numerous times in the form of several different models.
Algerian ‘home life’ soon descends into something more salacious. Models, directed by the photographer, pose in reclining positions, often either partially dressed or completely topless. Here, aside from the obvious unveiling, the (male) spectator is given access to a female space that he is ordinarily barred from, allowing him to finally gaze upon the ’forbidden’: the ’harem’. That the harem is a figment of his imagination, and not real space to be observed, is no problem for the photographer, for he has a long pictorial tradition to draw from.
Props take on a greater significance here; coffee “is the sublimation of the aromatic soul of the Orient” and the women drinking it “are supposed to suggest, by their languor and their unending reverie, a metaphysics of refreshment and odoriferous absorption.”10
The hookah plays its part too:
”The simple evocation of the hookah, associated with hashish, suffices to give life to a world of dreamy feminine presences, in various states of self-abandonment and lasciviousness, welcoming and without reserve. It implies general stupefaction of the sense that foreshadows their unbridled release. The women who smoke the hookah are no longer of this, the observable, world: they move in the ethereal space of the haram.”11
That the hookah is rarely used in Algeria, except as a decorative piece, is of no relevance to the photographer, for it is only the suggestion of authenticity that is required.
The reclining odalisque, the very symbol of the harem, completes the picture: “She fills it with a presence that is at once mysterious and luminous. She is hidden, yet available, core, always throbbing with restrained sensuality.”12
These eroticised postcard representations of the Algerian woman, given the flavour of authenticity through the use of props, dress and jewellery, offered Europe one of its first photographic encounters with Muslim women. As Alloula notes, “The perfection and the credibility of the illusion are ensured by the fact that the absent other is, by definition, unavailable and cannot issue a challenge.” The ‘other’ referred to here is the ‘real’ Algérienne, represented here by substitute.
The Veil as a Symbol
The political and ideological context in which the photographs were both taken and seen cannot be ignored. In Algeria Unveiled, Franz Fanon, writing before the independence of Algeria, explains how the veil was politicised by the French and the very unveiling of the Algerienne herself became a crucial step in breaking the Algerian resistance:
“The officials of the French administration in Algeria, committed to destroying the people’s originality, and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the Algerian woman.”11
Thus:
“Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.”12
In other words, the mere representation of an unveiled Algérienne also served a political purpose beyond satiating the desire of the European gaze. It served also to break the resistance movement within Algeria itself: “Algerian society with every abandoned veil seemed to express its willingness to attend the master’s school and to decide to change its habits under the occupier’s direction and patronage.” 13
Closing Remarks
By daring to defy the coloniser’s insatiable need to observe, the Algérienne, in her absence, was deconstructed and re-created by that most duplicitous operative of the coloniser’s regime, the photographer. The Algérienne was substituted, unveiled and turned into a fantasy long dreamed up by a Europe who used her body to help define its ideological ‘other.’
That these images, constructed with a clear intent to both objectify and eroticise its subjects, offered Europe one of its first ever photographic encounters of the Algerian, or indeed, Muslim, woman, makes clear the French colonial photographer’s complicity in furthering an orientalist ideological agenda. His deliberate staging of the photographs, an intervention that went far beyond normal aesthetic concerns (such as lighting), and the attempts to suggest an ethnographic interest, means that he cannot be absolved on the basis of artistic licensing.
The politicising of the veil by French authorities within Algeria, and the ideological attachment ‘unveiling’ subsequently carried, further implicates these photographs, even if only in hindsight, as an ideological tool of the French colonial authorities.
Footnotes
1 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem. University Of Minnesota Press, 1986, 5.
2 Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis. University of Chicago Press, 2016, 76.
3 Ibid.
4 Behdad, 8.
5 Alloula, 5.
6 Alloula, 14.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Alloula, 62.
10 Alloua, 74.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Franz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”, Decolonisation: Perspectives From Now And Then. Ed. Presenjit Duara.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
** This photograph appears in Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem – a collection of photographs taken in Algeria between 1900 and 1930. It is not always straightforward to determine the location of photographs taken in North Africa during this period, so despite its inclusion in Alloula’s collection, it seems it may actually have been taken in Tunis, by Lehnert and Landrock.
