{"id":4130,"date":"2012-08-29T13:16:08","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T11:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/camera.weblog.mur.at\/?page_id=4130"},"modified":"2016-08-08T13:46:25","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T11:46:25","slug":"photoarchive-pierre-bourdieu","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/camera-austria.at\/en\/photoarchive-pierre-bourdieu\/","title":{"rendered":"Photo Archive Pierre Bourdieu"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pierre Bourdieu:<\/strong>
\nIn Algeria. Testimonies of Uprooting.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Even photography-lovers with little interest in sociology will most likely be familiar with Pierre Bourdieu thanks to his investigation of this \u201cmiddle-brow art\u201d that has already become a classic. But the fact that he took up the camera himself in order to back up his ethnological field studies in Algeria in the early sixties with the aid of photographic testimonies is largely unknown. Only a few of these hundreds of photos were published on the cover of one or the other of Bourdieu\u2019s works, albeit practically unnoticed by the public.<\/p>\n

When, in the course of a discussion about his Algerian studies, Bourdieu mentioned his mostly unpublished photographs, spontaneous curiosity soon led to the idea of publishing this hitherto unknown aspect of Bourdieu’s work. Representing mainly ethnographic primary material, these photographs must be viewed and interpreted in relation to the specific scientific interest underlying the choice of subject, the angle of view, the inclusion of context and the resulting construction of the object to be captured, if one does not want to indulge in an ahistoric aesthetic purism and to ignore the social meaning and political significance of these images. They are “framed” by their very conditions of production, operating in a specific socio-historical context which they aim to document or, in Bourdieu’s term, \u201cobjectify\u201d in a particular way.
\nFrench colonisation (since 1930) dramatically reshaped Algeria, previously marked as it had been by a pre-Capitalist system and ethics of economy: brutal enforcement of profoundly foreign economic principles, rapid decline of traditional agricultural production methods, emergence of a new subproletariat, economic precarisation and social uprooting were the fate of wide sections of the population. For the sociological observer, this unfurled a broad field for observing and analysing social change. What becomes of a society when it sees itself faced with a new mode of economic commerce and logic of action that is inconsistent with all social rules that have been valid for generations? To what extent does the traditional economic habitus confine the scope for action of social actors, and to what degree does it structure what is imaginable and unimaginable or delimit the field of the possible? What forms of suffering and poverty are concomitant of this state of social uprooting and loss of order?
\nThese are some of the fundamental sociological questions that faced Pierre Bourdieu as of the mid-fifties, after having been assigned as a conscript to Algeria, a land marked by the ravages of the struggle for liberty against the French colonial masters. Five years later he returned to Paris, a \u201cseasoned\u201d sociologist and ethnologist. The interim covers several years of intensive field research, participatory observation, extensive statistical surveys, countless depth interviews and discussions with experts, and hundreds of photographs \u2013 all in difficult, indeed often dramatic circumstances.<\/p>\n

The exhibition
\n<\/strong>The exchange between Camera Austria, The Bourdieu Foundation and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu between 2000 and 2002 led to a comprehensive project: he entrusted his entire archive of photographs taken during his fieldwork in Algeria between the years of 1958 and 1961, and representing, as he noted, his earliest and at the same time his most topical work, to Camera Austria with the intention of exhibiting and publishing these photographs for the first time. In collaboration with Bourdieu who unfortunately died in 2002, and Franz Schultheis, Fondation Bourdieu<\/a>, the photographic documents were looked through, structured and related to the ethnographic and sociological studies Bourdieu carried out in Algeria during the same period. The exhibition \u201cPierre Bourdieu: In Algeria. Testimonies of Uprooting.” shows the historical, scientific but also biographical contexts of this extensive work.<\/p>\n

The publication<\/strong>
\nPierre Bourdieu’s groundbreaking fieldwork, now supplemented for the first time by his photographs, provides insight into the nascent state of his sociology. Apart from this dimension of shedding light on the evolution of Bourdieu\u2019s work, his images also comprise an impressive socio-historical document.
\nReading Bourdieu\u2019s photos alternately with his writings from this period, and if we see both media as complementary approaches not only to a social world that is becoming increasingly alien to us, but also, and above all, to an image of the human being that is rapidly being washed away by the erosive forces of modernism, these photos provide a wealth of so material illustrating the habitus and ethos of pre-modern man and his inherent dignity.
\nBourdieu’s sociological and photographic work in Algeria testifies to a society full of uneven developments where people still have not overcome their homeless and uprooted situation their alienation from both tradition and modernity. Maybe it is Algeria\u2019s tragedy that even after four decades these images have still lost none of their topicality and realism.<\/p>\n

The Archive<\/strong>
\nThe photographic documents by Pierre Bourdieu are above all the result of scientific work, and in this sense they must be viewed in a constructive context together with the texts that he wrote at the same time, and thus have a specific historical and thematic framework. The first task in our work, then, was to scrutinise the photographic documentations for contexts that Pierre Bourdieu analyses in his writings. We attempted to read Pierre Bourdieu\u2019s archive and all of the circumstances of this collection of negatives and prints, comments and the collection of sketches contained in the \u201cfiches d\u2019Algerie\u201d (collection of notes from Algeria), in the context of Bourdieu\u2019s studies. Pierre Bourdieu himself had already begun to tentatively combine pictures and texts, and we were able to follow this model.<\/p>\n

Since taking these photographs, Pierre Bourdieu only published few of them, and the vast majority of his photographic documentations so far has remained unknown. Those familiar with Bourdieu\u2019s work will recognise the photographs that were chosen as cover pictures for the first editions of his books: \u201cLe Deracinement\u201d (with Abdelmalek Sayad); \u201cTravail et travailleurs en Algerie\u201d (with Alain Darbel et al.); \u201cAlgerie \u201860\u201d and \u201cLe Sens pratique\u201d. But photographs from the collection were also used for articles and magazine interviews. Numerous photographs used in publications, however, can no longer be found in the archive and in some cases there is not even a negative as a great many of the perhaps 2000 pictures taken in the four years of work were lost during moves. The archive currently comprises 600 negatives (format 6 cm x 6 cm), 199 contact and work prints (format between 6 cm x 6 cm and a maximum of 12.5 cm x 12.5 cm). The main body of the archive, alongside the negatives, comprises 146 large-format prints with a format of 23 cm x 23 cm and a smaller group with a format of 30 cm x 30 cm, that Pierre Bourdieu collated in three themed albums. There are no negatives of 26 of these 146 prints, i.e. these prints are now the only sources available to us.<\/p>\n

All titles and dates are given by Pierre Bourdieu, place names have been added where it was possible to derive them unequivocally from the photos or from publications. We retained the numbering of the negatives as the archive numbers of the pictures, with a system of letters indicating whether the archive contains an original print with a negative (O), an original print without a negative (R) or only the negative (N). Finally, we created work prints from all negatives and scans of all original photos and the main pictures of the exhibition and book so as to avoid the risk of further damage to the originals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the same understanding view of the ethnologist with which I regarded Algeria, I could also view myself, the people from my home, my parents, my father’s and my mother’s pronunciation, all re-appropriating it in a totally undramatic manner. This is one of the greatest problems of uprooted intellectuals when all that remains to them is the choice between populism and, on the contrary, shame induced by class racism. I encountered these people, who are very much akin to the Kabyles and with whom I spent my youth, from a perspective of understanding that is mandatory for ethnology, defining it as a discipline. Photography, which I practised first in Algeria and then in B\u00e9arn, undoubtedly contributed a great deal to this conversion of my perspective \u2013 and I don’t think this word ‘conversion’ is too strong. Photography, you see, is a manifestation of the distance of the observer, who collects his data \u2013 and is always aware that he is collecting data \u2013 but at the same time photography also assumes the complete proximity of the familiar, of attention, and a sensitivity with regard to even the least perceptible of details. Details that the observer can only understand and interpret thanks to his familiarity (and do we not say that someone who behaves well, is ‘attentive’?) and a sensitivity for the infinitely small detail of an act that even the most attentive of ethnologists generally fails to notice. But photography itself is equally interwoven with the relationship that I have had to my subject at any particular time and not for a moment did I forget that my subject is people \u2013 human beings whom I have encountered from a perspective that, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I would willingly refer to as caring, often touched.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Extract of an interview with Pierre Bourdieu from: In Algerien. Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung<\/em>. (Engl.: Picturing Algeria<\/em>, 2012, page 1)<\/p>\n

\"Logo_Fondation\"<\/a>

http:\/\/www.fondation-bourdieu.org\/<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pierre Bourdieu: In Algeria. Testimonies of Uprooting. Even photography-lovers with little interest in sociology will most likely be familiar with Pierre Bourdieu thanks to his investigation of this \u201cmiddle-brow art\u201d that has already become a classic. But the fact that he took up the camera himself in order to back up his ethnological field studies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"fotoarchiv-pierre-bourdieu.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4130","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPhoto Archive Pierre Bourdieu - Camera Austria<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/camera-austria.at\/en\/photoarchive-pierre-bourdieu\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Photo Archive Pierre Bourdieu - Camera Austria\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pierre Bourdieu: In Algeria. Testimonies of Uprooting. 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