Pierre Bourdieu 1
The author of more than 25 influential books, including Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, The Weight of the World and The Rules of Art , Pierre Bourdieu (1930 - 2002) was a key thinker of the twentieth century whose work has influenced and reverberated through contemporary artistic practice.
Bourdieu trained as a philosopher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and in 1956 was conscripted for military service in Algeria. Two years later he became a lecturer at the University of Algiers. This was a time of political upheaval for Algeria as it resisted French imperialism, seeking to assert its own identity beyond that of a colonized country. The Algerian War of Independence (1954 - 62) was a period of fighting and guerrilla strikes between the French army and colonists and pro-independence Algerians, with the main force being the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). On arriving in Algeria, Bourdieu became overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility to record the situation, and to give testimony of those who had no voice. Bourdieu was driven to "make [himself]... useful and decided to undertake a study on Algerian society, in order to make it a bit clearer to people back home what was happening in this country" 2.
Towards the end of his life, Bourdieu worked with sociologist Franz Schultheis and the group of artists, curators and editors of Camera Austria to archive and present a complete project on this fieldwork in Algeria, creating a unique insight into a culture on the brink of independence, struggling to release itself from colonial structures and revealing an instant where modernity and tradition collided. His methodology set out to examine the ways that people existed, and then to work out why they lived the way that they did. Initially Bourdieu was reluctant to see these photographs as having any aesthetic interest: they were produced as tools for his research, as an aide mémoire , while providing Bourdieu with a "way of looking, a way to sharpen [his]... awareness, to look more closely" 3. The photographs are impressive documents of social history showing a world of uneven development where people have still not overcome their homelessness and uprooting, resulting in an estrangement from tradition and modern times alike. Even after four decades, these photographs have lost none of their immediacy and relevance
Photography can mirror existing social hierarchies that we inhabit in our everyday life, and Pierre Bourdieu was painfully aware of his own subjective cultural position in creating this document of the Algerian people. He cautiously avoided using the objectification of the subjects as 'other', the very impression that the symbolic violence of colonialism sought to communicate. In retrospect these images not only recall a specific moment in history, but also explore the machinations of colonial power and provide an insight into the development of Bourdieu's own sociological doctrine as it developed over the next 40 years.
Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre
The exhibition is developed and curated from the archive by Christine Frisinghelli, Camera Austria , Graz, and Franz Schultheis, Fondation Liber, Département de Sociologie, Université de Genève. It was accompanied by a publication.
1 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle Brow Art , 1965, English translation 1990 Stanford University Press.
2 Pierre Bourdieu in conversation with Franz Schulteis 2001, Camera Austria 75, 2001
3 ibid.
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