Collectif - L'Algérie aux cent visages - 1955

Algeria with a Hundred Faces

Exemplaire numéroté on Johannot.

This work brings together 96 literary texts – excerpts of prose or poetry – set against 96 full-page heliogravure photographs. The editorial principle is one of dialogue between literature and photography: for each image there is a text fragment evoking the same face of Algeria. The authors summoned form a remarkable anthology spanning twenty-five centuries, from Sallust, Virgil and Saint Augustine to Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, André Gide, Gustave Flaubert, Francis Jammes, Omar Khayyam, Émile Henriot, Emmanuel Roblès and Albert Camus.

Most of the photographs are by Marcel Bovis (Nice, 1904 – Paris, 1997), one of the masters of French humanist photography, cofounder of the Group of XV – alongside Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat and René-Jacques – which from 1946 to 1957 gathered the most important postwar French photographers around a humanitarian ideal and an aesthetics of everyday life. Other photographers contributed to the album: Ofalac, Vetillard, Camilleri, Pinard, Salama. The images cover the entirety of the Algerian territory – Sahara landscapes, Arab towns, high plateaus, Mediterranean coasts – daily life, souks, portraits of veiled women and of children, scenes of work in fields and on construction sites.

Published in 1955, the work appeared in an extremely tense context: the Algerian War officially began on November 1, 1954, with the Toussaint Rouge attacks. The preface by the governor-general Roger Léonard – favorable to a policy of integration – and the work’s stance of celebrating the beauty and diversity of a French Algeria at the very moment it was tearing itself apart give this publication a dimension that is both testimonial and deeply ambivalent, a reflection of the contradictions of that era. This Golden Book of Colonial Algeria today constitutes a top-tier visual and literary document on late French presence in Algeria.

Algeria with a Hundred Faces was published in Paris by Arts et Métiers Graphiques in 1955, with a preface by Roger Léonard. The work was produced under the auspices of the Interior and Fine Arts Directorate of the Government General of Algeria. It is presented in a large folio in sheets (36 × 28 cm), consisting of 96 plates of full-page heliogravure with a facing page of text, bound in a slipcase with a matching blue-green publisher’s hard case. Signs of rubbing and foxing on the box, the paper of the slipcase has discolored.