In the decades before World War I, any European photographing in a distant land was sure to have made images loaded with bias and presumption — inevitable 19th-century colonial baggage. Making photographs in Islamic North Africa added convolutions that still resonate.
So what did French photographer Alexandre Bougault actually intend when he visited Algeria between 1890 and 1910 with his fixed-lens, 8-by-22-inch panoramic camera? Looking at the 12 prints in the humble, provocative and rather richly layered “Inhabited Landscapes” at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, how can we assess and reconsider them fairly?
Take ”Sand Dunes in the Desert,” a classic romanticizing view of a vast emptiness in Algeria, with two figures — Berbers, we assume — riding camels seemingly to nowhere. It is tempting to bask in the sheer beauty of the scene, as many Parisians surely did at the time, safe in their homes. The photographer’s formal application to the unusually wide, rectangular shape of the print only magnifies the effect. How nice, how foreign! It might be the same sentiment movie viewers have after “Lawrence of Arabia” (also photographed in the deserts with a wide aspect ratio).
This kind of admiring viewpoint is understandable, if a bit lazy. Aesthetically, the set of three very vertical landscapes push into more novel territory (imagine a movie shot sideways). The gorgeous ”Stream in an Oasis” seems set-up, the barefoot woman (unmentioned in the title) gathering water with a bucket on a rope too perfectly placed. It reminds me of the exquisite photography of Native Americans by Edward Curtis around the same time, with different motivations.
Posing in photography implies not only compositional control but also a manipulation of content. Bougault’s photographs give us little reason to believe he was much different than other French visitors to the region, and he dishes out many salable picture-book ideas of what this “other” world is like, or should be like. While attractive to the European mind of the time, it really gives no hint that the subject might rather object — that the Algerians, as largely Muslim North Africans, might have hated Bougault and the subjugation and arrogance he represented.
Of course, Bougault might have been a nice guy. Who knows? And the colonized do not normally have the opportunity to protest their overlords. And that makes a few other, more honest photographs, the real tinder of the show. These appear in a group called “Resilience,” one of three categories suggested by the show’s curator, Ana-Joel Falcon-Wiebe. It is the resilience of the indigenous culture and their religion that penetrates.
One of the most striking images in the show is ”Nomad Encampment.” A group of Berbers have set up simple shelters in the rough desert, and are sitting (or lying down) with a casual irregularity that seems to be the unposed truth. The subjects no doubt know that Bougault is there (there is no hiding his oversized camera and glass plate accoutrements), but there is no intention to romanticize or even prettify.
There are others that approach this, like ”The Great Prayer,” in which a large group kneels in the open desert, and ”The Marriage Procession in the Hoggar,” which shows a caravan of camels and people along a high mountain road in far southern Algeria. At a different extreme are two views of Algiers, along the waterfront, utterly prosaic. All of these show that Bougault sometimes cut through the clichés of Orientalism in his art.
This is the kind of focused, small exhibition that rewards close reading. And the curator and other collaborators make this a pleasure, complete with soundtrack of topical music and period poems. A brochure is in the making with fuller details on Bougault.
These are indeed inhabited landscapes. Yet there is no hint of military domination or of the cultural dissonance that the French controlled in various ways until Algerian independence in 1962. But we can read between the lines and feel the sympathetic, filtered point of view of an outsider through these curious, and curiously demanding, photographs.
