Framing the colony: Houses of Algeria photographed

Art History

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 616-626

  Çelik, Zeynep ^a  

^a NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249345005     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00440.x     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. The relationship between modernity and visual culture has been discussed, for example, by Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, California, 1993,
2. Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900, London and New York, 2000.
3. 'La photographie en Algérie', La Lumière, 6:12, 22 March 1856, 45.
4. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, 1972, 8.
5. Allan Sekula, 'On the Invention of Photographic Meaning' in Vicky Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, New York, 1982;
6. Steven Cagan, 'Notes on Activist Photography' in Roman de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds, Late Imperial Culture, London and New York, 1995, 73.
7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1981 (first published in French, 1980), 26.
8. Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950, New York, 1988, 3, 4.
9. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 107.
10. Cagan, 'Notes on Activist Photography', 76.
11. The concepts are borrowed from Barthes. See Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader, New York, 1982, 207, 208.
12. Documentation on the houses before the sixteenth century is extremely rare, whereas the habous documents of the Ottoman period provide some data. However, dating the buildings remains a major problem. See Sakina Missoun, Alger à l'époque ottomane: La médina et la maison traditionnelle, Aix-en-Provence, 2003. Missoun notes that 6,800 houses were recorded in the 1830s; the number had dwindled to 1,200 in the 1980s (195). Despite some government subsidies to owners to restore their properties, the old city is in a state of increasing decay, with growing holes in its fabric. The mansions from the Ottoman period, put under other uses and declared historic monuments, do not share the fate of the more modest structures.
13. Djamila Amrane, Les Femmes algériennes dans la guerre, Paris, 1991, 45.
14. I examined this issue in my Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule, Berkeley, 1997, especially in chap. 3.
15. Quoted in Julia Clancy-Smith, 'The Colonial Gaze: Sex and Gender in the Discourses of French North Africa', in L. Carl Brown and Matthew S. Gordon, eds, Franco-Arab Encounters, Beirut, 1996, 212.
16. Quoted in Clancy-Smith, 'The Colonial Gaze', 214.
17. Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798-1836, Princeton, 1998.
18. Of course, I borrow the concept of lieu de mémoire from Pierre Nora. See Pierre Nora, 'Preface to the English-Language edition' in Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, New York, 1996. Nora distinguished two types of lieux de mémoire: the topographical, characterized by their specific location, and the portable.
19. See Nora, 'Between Memory and History' in Realms of Memory, 3, 14-15. I use Eugène Delacroix's Les Femmes d'Alger as an example of the second type.
20. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1991, 39.
21. On the Palace of Mustapha Pasha, see Lucien Golvin, Palais et demeures d'Alger à la période ottomane, Aix-en-Provence, 1988, 46-57.
22. See Nabila Oublesir, 'La découverte des monuments de l'Algérie' in Figures de l'orientalisme en architecture, special issue of La revue du monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 73/74, 1994, 57-76, especially 57-65.
23. On Dar Aziza, see Golvin, Palais et demeures, 30-45.
24. Paul S. Landau underlines this point in reference to photography in Africa' in general. See Paul S. Landau, 'Empire and the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa', in Paul S. Landau and Deborah Kaspin, eds, Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa, Berkeley, Ca., 2002, 161.