Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Abstract

| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art of Algiers (Musée Public National d’Art Moderne et Contemporain d’Alger; MAMA) staged a group exhibition that featured photography from the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62).1 Les Photographes de Guerre, Les Djounoud du noir et blanc (May 14–August 30, 2013) featured blown-up black-and-white photographs on three floors of the museum, a repurposed department store from the early twentieth century in the former European quarter of Algiers. Images taken by professional and amateur Algerian photographers were placed alongside those by international and French image makers, revealing the broader networks of visual production during the war (see Djehiche and Djilali 2013). Fought between the National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale; FLN) and the French colonial state, the Algerian War of Independence holds a prolific place within histories of decolonization due to its excessive violence and impact on other liberation movements on the continent. For a long time, however, it was thought to have been pictured exclusively through French visual production, which often served to support or produce colonial propaganda (see Stora 2005: 199–220).2 However, by unearthing the work of Algerian photographers and mapping the extensive infrastructure of photographic studios that supported FLN politics across the region, the exhibition countered assumptions of an alleged absence of visual representation produced from “within” the revolution. Almost a decade before, Photographier la guerre d’Algérie, an exhibition organized by Laurent Gervereau and Benjamin Stora at the Hôtel de Sully in Paris (January 23–April 18, 2004) had offered a far more Francocentric view of the war’s photographic legacy. Gervereau and Stora’s show featured the work of official French military photographers, including René Bail and Marc Flament, photojournalists Marc Riboud and Raymond Depardon, as well as international reporters including Dickey Chapelle and Kryn Taconis. The exhibition featured only a handful of images taken by Algerian photographers, all of whom were relegated to anonymity. An “Algerian point of view” in photography, the exhibition’s organizers lamented, was rare during the war (Gervereau and Stora 2004: 7–9). Even in instances when the revolution succeeded in producing visual representation for its own political purposes, they added, it was quickly buried under the flood of pictures produced by French propaganda and published, for instance, in the military magazine Le Bled. Yet given the wealth of images shown at MAMA in 2013, these claims need to be reassessed. While Stora and Gervereau rightly noted that unequal financial resources on the French and Algerian sides informed the war’s visual production, they obscured the revolution’s varied photographic cultures by relegating the Algerian bodies of work to the margins of the show. The exhibition organized a decade later in Algiers proposed to see the war’s visual legacy differently. By revealing the broader networks of image production during the war, which included many African as well as international actors, the show complicated views of an entirely French-controlled visual culture.3 Among the images on display at MAMA were those taken by the photographer Mohamed Kouaci (1922–1996), who worked for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne; GPRA) between 1958 and 1962. The GPRA was a government-in-exile formed to give further legitimacy to the anticolonial revolution and to strengthen the international negotiating position of the FLN (Vince 2015: 37). When Mohamed Kouaci began working for the GPRA, its seat was in Tunisia, which became an important base for Algerian nationalists following the retreat of French troops in 1956 (Bizard 2002: 225). Mohamed Kouaci’s position within the FLN granted Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira’s Gardiennes d’images