large quantities of photographs in the late nine-
teenth century that remained in commercial
circulation through the early twentieth. Jules Ger-
vais-Courtellmont, a French convert to Islam,
published the illustrated magazineL’Alge ́rie Artis-
tique et Pittoresque(1890–1892) and created thou-
sands of direct color autochrome plates frequently
reproduced in the popular press. Austrian photo-
grapher Rudolf Lehnert and German manager
Ernst Landrock worked together in Tunis from
1904–1914 and Cairo from 1924–1930, at which
time Lehnert returned to work in Tunis alone.
Prolific and artistically ambitious, the two pro-
duced a broad range of images, including roman-
tic Saharan vistas and erotic portraits, distributed
through monographs and as original prints, litho-
graphs, and postcards.
In an important theoretical text on Algerian
postcards, Malek Alloula describes the corrosive
impact of these mass-produced, erotic postcard
images on the society of their colonized subjects.
He writes
Behind this image of Algerian women, probably repro-
duced in the millions, there is visible the broad outline
of one of the figures of the colonial perception of the
native. This figure can be essentially defined as the
practice of a right of (over)sight that the colonizer arro-
gates to himself and that is the bearer of multiform
violence. The postcard fully partakes in such vio-
lence... (5)Westerners’ creation of visual imagery stimulated
by a vision of North Africa(ns) as exotic ‘‘Other’’
began well before the period on which Alloula con-
centrates (1900–1930) and arguably extends to the
present. Paul Bowles’ recently published ‘‘souvenir
snapshots’’ of his life in Tangier, Morocco, ambigu-
ously relate to this tradition, offering a hermetic
vision of the author’s expatriate existence.
Anthropological and archeological photography
represent two varieties of imagery created through-
out the twentieth century. In the first category is
the work of pioneering Finnish sociologist Edward
Westermarck, whose photographs of Morocco in
the years before the First World War were made
into lantern slides to illustrate his lectures and,
intended only as utilitarian documents, were fre-
quently of questionable technical quality. By con-
trast, the work of Harry Burton was of sufficient
aesthetic merit to warrant a 2001 exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bur-
ton was an archeological expedition photographer
in Egypt for the Metropolitan and for Howard
Carter and Lord Carnavon, discoverers of the
tomb of Tutankhamen.
The Second World War, fought across North
Africa, saw the creation of innumerable photo-
graphs, which generally take as their subjects the
battling Axis and Allied armies. Unfortunately,
these images are usually published in books aimed
at aficionados of military history, which reproduce
images with little of the context that is of particular
interest to art historians.
The early history of artistic photography in
North Africa is, of yet, little studied. The first
photographic exhibition was held in Egypt in 1923;
the second, in 1933, featured 600 photographs by
roughly 130 photographers, over half them Egyp-
tian. Contemporary photographers have figured in
recent exhibitions of African art in the West. The
1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York,In/sight: African Photo-
graphers, 1940 to the Present, included, for exam-
ple, Egyptian Nabil Boutros’ documentary images
of Cairo’s people by night and arresting photo-
graphs of the body at moments of birth and death
by Tunisia’s Touhami Ennadre. Zineb Sedira
works in the context of the North African dia-
spora. Born to Algerian immigrants in Paris, her
work deals with cultural assimilation and family
identity within North African Muslim society in
the West.
KEVINMulhearn
Seealso:Documentary Photography; Photography
in Africa: An Overview; Portraiture; Representation
and ‘‘the Other’’Further Reading
Alloula, Malek.The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Bowles, Paul.Paul Bowles Photographs: How Could I Send
a Picture into the Desert?New York: Scalo, 1994.
Convert, Pascal. ‘‘Medea the Algerian.’’Art Press286 (Jan-
uary 2003); 19–23.
Courtellemont, Guy. ‘‘Jules Gervais-Courtellemont (1863–
1931): Autochromist.’’History of Photography20 (Fall
1996); 255–257.
Daly, M.W., and L.E. Forbes.The Sudan: Photographs
from the Sudan Archive, Durham University Library.
Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994.
Durand-Evrard, Franc ̧ oise, and Lucienne Martini.Archives
d’Alge ́rie: 1830–1960. Paris: Hazan, 2003.
Egypt: Dream and Realities. Cairo: Aujourd’hui l’Egypte,
1993.
Evans, Elaine Altman.Scholars, Scoundrels, and the Sphinx:
a Photographic and Archaeological Adventure up the Nile.
Knoxville, TN: McClung Museum, 2000.
Fletcher, David.Tanks in Camera: Archive Photographs
from the Tank Museum, the Western Desert: 1940–
1943. Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998.
Gabous, Abdelkrim.La Tunisie des Photographes: 1875–
1910. Tunis: Editions CERES, 1994.AFRICA: NORTH, PHOTOGRAPHY IN