France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830 opened up North Africa to European occupation leading to fifty years of brutal warfare conducted against its Muslim populations by the French army. A prelude to the wider “scramble for Africa,” France subsequently invaded Tunisia in 1881 and Morocco in 1912. Egypt became a veiled British protectorate in 1882. Photography followed quickly on the heels of colonial occupation and the GRI holds some of the earliest photographs taken in Algeria. Among them is a calotype portrait of two Algerian musicians shot by Thomas Elmore, the British vice-consul in Algiers, in 1852.
GRI’s colonial holdings from Algeria are some of the most extensive outside of France and comprise photographs made by studio photographers and tourists, as well as religious figures and colonial officials. French studios operating in Algiers comprise those of Claude-Joseph Portier, Jean Geiser, and his sometime partner, Jean-Baptiste Antoine Alary, as well as Alexandre Leroux. French photographers exploiting a demand for Algerian subjects also includes Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin who, sponsored by the French government, began an eighteen-month tour of Algeria in 1856. He published his six volume L'Algérie photographique in 1858. The twenty frontal and profile portraits of ten Algerian soldiers taken in Paris in 1863 by Jacques-Philippe Potteau, were part of his larger anthropological project known as the Collection Anthropologique du Muséum de Paris (1855-1869). Tourist views of Algeria include images of the cities of Oran and Constantine, desert oases, and Berber and Roman archaeological sites, as well as of the complex ethnic make-up of the region, comprising portraits of indigenous Berbers, Jews, Muslims and Kabyles. A unique album of photographs compiled by Henri Ducat, a French Jesuit missionary, stationed at an orphanage at Ben Aknoun in the vicinity of Algiers between 1854 and 1870 is among the collected works.
Later representations of Algeria include two albums belonging to the artist Anna Mireille Abitbol, documenting her studies and family life in the early 1920s in French Algeria, which incorporates photographs of her classmates at the École des beaux arts in Oran. Photographs by travelers working elsewhere in the region, notably in Tunisia, but also in Morocco, Libya, and Egypt include photographs made in 1873 by the German photographer, Philipp Remelé, during an expedition in the Libyan-Egyptian desert led by Gerhard Rohlf. The final defeat and expulsion of the French from North Africa in 1962 is given presence by the French soldier, Marc Garanger’s, portraits of men and women from the Algerian War, and an anti-war photo book, Algerien = L'Algérie, produced by the East German photographer, Dirk Alvermann, published in East Berlin in 1960.
Image: Unknown photographer. Baraka. 1881. Albumen print. Getty Research Institute, 2001.R.20-47r.