#marc garanger

Femme algérienne 1960, photo d'identité, commandée par l'armée française à la fin de la guerre d'Algérie, dans les villages de regroupements.

For the record Marc Garanger was a photographer who was drafted by France to go fight in Algeria. Once there he didn’t want to fight so he told them about his job and how he had his camera with himself. So they decided that instead of fighting he would help the propaganda by taking pictures.

He is famous for two sets of pictures. One was in a concentration camp (the French called them regrouping villages because admitting they had concentration camps right after WW2 was a bad look) the soldiers wanted the women to have ID so they wanted Garanger to take the pictures. He took the pictures of these women who did not want their pictures to be taken and then were forced to unveil. Now Garanger was against the war (don’t think that automatically makes him good) and he often talked about these women’s eyes. The dignity and the fight he could see in their eyes even when they were forced to unveil and sit for these pictures. I don’t think these pictures should be erased but I think using one of these pictures as a cover of the Wretched of the Earth without giving any context to the picture especially when it’s an English edition which means very few people will get the reference is fucked up. They had the decency to use one of the pictures where the woman was still veiled but it sits so fucking wrong. They didn’t want their pictures to be taken the French forced them to to be able to control them and it all happened in a fucking concentration camp. (I also think the pictures can be used ethically IF ONE PROVIDE THE CONTEXT because Garanger went back to Algeria years later and found some of these women and asked them this time if he could take a picture of them happy and with their loved ones for some sort of before the liberation/after the liberation and some of them accepted)

For those who are curious about Garanger’s other famous picture go below the cut it’s super interesting but it’s unrelated to the first part.

A 1960 photograph of an Algerian woman in a French regroupment village, Marc Garanger.

Marc Garanger

Mujer Argelina, 1960

In 1960, at the end of the Algerian War, photographer Marc Garanger was posted with the French Army in the small Kabylian settlement of Ain Terzine, one of the 'regroupment villages' into which mountain dwellers had been forced to keep members of the resistance from communicating. It was soon decided that these resettled people should carry mandatory identity cards as is the case in France; Garanger was tasked with photographing each of the 2,000 Berber and Muslim villagers over a period of ten days. The resulting portraits of the women in particular have formed a powerful record of that conflict.