ABSTRACT
“The imperial conquest,” Edward Said writes, “was not a one-time tearing of the veil, but a continually repeated, institutionalized presence in French life, where the response to the silent and incorporated disparity between French and subjugated cultures took on a variety of forms.” 1 Based on access to technology, there were vast, institutionalized inequities and disparities between conqueror and subjugated peoples, since the camera and conquest overlapped chronologically, linking French photographic representations of Algeria and Algerians to the larger phenomenon of Orientalism in its enduring historical and visual aspects. The camera was not merely a device to capture images, and photographs functioned as more than “sensorially restrained objects: mute and motionless variegated rectangles.” 2 Photography contributed to creating meaning and signification through the everyday, repeated and systematic practices of picture taking by the French in Algeria. For Said, whose corpus engages with the politics of Orientalist representation in the media, photography, and advertising, it is obvious that “[t]here can be no unilateral withdrawal from ideology. Surely it is quixotic to expect photographic interpretation to serve such a purpose.” 3 He alerts viewers, readers, and especially photographers to the need for “a proper schooling in the visual faculties.” His insistence on the image as possessing an ideological point of view underpins his call for scholars of the visual to revisit the variety of imagined, pictured geographies of the Orient. To do so, I explore the visual, cultural form of biometric technologies that marked the French colonial bureaucratic presence through a set of colonial tourist postcards of Algeria, called Scènes et Types in French, and consider these images in relation to the parallel and coeval practices of French-imposed identity photographs and anthropometric classification systems. Such complex legacies of colonial French photography in Algeria re-emerge as Scènes et Types photographs and continue to circulate in Western museums and publications to this day, a century after their initial production and circulation. Moreover, since contemporary North Africans have become consumers of their former colonial visual histories even decades after Algeria’s independence, Said’s enduring question remains pertinent: “how does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past?” 4
