This historiographical talk connects recent works on post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman history with histories of interwar Egypt. Using the approach of global legal history, I experiment with the category of “sovereign local state” to describe post-Ottoman Egypt under British occupation until the 1950s and beyond.
1848 for the second and final time.
Good afternoon good evening
wherever you are welcome um.
My name is Ali Bedhad. I'm the director of
the Center for Near Eastern Studies and
on behalf of my colleagues at the Center,
I would like to welcome you to today's
lecture before I introduce our
speaker very soon I just want to say a couple words about
our Center in case you
happen to not know about it.
We are the Center for Nearest and Studies is a
research hub where over 100 faculty from
across the entire UCLA campus
collaborate in a variety of research and
pedagogical projects
and founded in 1957
by the great orientalist
von Grunebaum.
It's one of the oldest and most
distinguished U.S centers for
interdisciplinary
research on the Middle East broadly
construed.
We provide a forum for the exchange of
ideas and the dissemination of
knowledge and information within and
beyond the campus offering cutting-edge
research
and fresh perspective on the challenges
and cultural richness of the Middle East
and this is this talk actually um is
part of our
book series and research studies that we
do on
Middle East in art and photography in
Middle East and beyond.
I would like to invite you to check our
website where you will find all the
events and programs of our Center as
well as recorded events in the past.
So please do check our website.
So Professor Raisa Rexer actually belongs
to a new generation of art historian who
combined the advantage of a very rich
archival research and theoretical
knowledge.
Um so it's her work actually has been
fascinating and for me personally I as I
mentioned to her, I very much look
forward um to her talk because it deals
with um the sort of the
the historical questions as well as
theoretical questions uh about
photography of
Middle East and Middle Eastern people.
I've described it as orientalist
photography but I think her work
actually even complicates the notion of
orientalist photography.
Professor Rexer is an Assistant
Professor of French at Vanderbilt
University
whose research focuses actually on both
literature and the history of
photography in the 19th century France.
Which also makes her kind of a unique um
person in in some ways; I like to always
say that some of the best
photography scholars happen to be also
literature people. Let me think of
Susan Sontag and
Roland Barthes for example.
And so she belongs to that
group of people. Her art criticism and
articles have appeared in numerous
publication including art magazines,
museum catalogues, and such
scholarly journals as Yale French Studies,
Dix-Neuf, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Romanic Review.
Her first book, The Fallen Veil:
A Literary and Cultural History of the
Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France
and a fascinating book for those of you
who are may not be familiar, I highly
recommend it, was published actually by
University of Pennsylvania Press last year
in 2021.
she's currently working on a dual
biography of 19th century woman
photographer
Laure-Mathilde
Gouin and her model
Antonia and tentatively titled the
Photographer and the Model: A Biography
in Images.
Her talk today is entitled The Orient
Deconstructed: Moulin's
Female Portraits in Algeria, 1856-1858.
So please join me in welcoming Professor
Rexer to our virtual podium and thanks
again for joining us.
Thank you so much Ali for inviting me.
Thank you to everyone for coming and I
would be remiss if I didn't thank
Christian for being very patient in
scheduling me over the past year
especially with my slow email response.
Um so again thank you to everyone for
being here. I'm truly delighted to be
able to talk about a topic that has been
on my mind for years
um but I didn't have the nudge to put
things on paper so Ali's invitation
gave me that nudge that I needed. And one
last thing before i begin
as the title of my book indicated
uh much of my research centers on nude
photography and although that is not the
primary topic today, there will actually be quite a bit
of nudity including one quite explicit
image and I'll give everybody a warning
if you don't feel comfortable with that,
um obviously you do not need to feel
obligated to look at the image. But
it's really a warning so that there are
there's nobody around you who might be
surprised by the appearance of uh nude
photography in my talk.
So without further ado,
in 1856 armed with letters of
recommendation from the French
government and carrying thousands of
pounds of equipment and baggage, the
Parisian photographer Felix Jacques Antoine
Moulin set out for Algeria
returning nearly three years later with
hundreds of photographs of the people
and places of France's colonial
territory.
His work provides one of the earliest
photographic records of Algeria but also
presents a number of interpretive
puzzles.
Today I'd like to propose a new reading
of his photographs by putting the female
portraits from his trip to Algeria in
dialogue with his photographic work from
his earlier career in France.
I'll begin by talking a little bit about
these early photographs focusing on his
nudes and female portraits and
particularly his use of orientalist
tropes in those images. Then I will turn
to his photographs from Algeria to show
how the French photographs help us to
reframe the discussion of his Algerian
portraits.
I propose to show that Moulin's
photographic portraits of Algerian women
are caught between what I would describe
as an expectation of exotic othering
and an impulse to find the familiar in
his foreign subjects.
Ultimately the later photographs in Algeria reveal
the degree to which his earlier
orientalist images were the product of a
cultural imaginary about the orient as a
fictitious space that broke down in the
face of its reality.
As Moulin's camera deconstructs the
aesthetic tropes of contemporary orientalism
it instead re-figures the Algerian women
in his photographs so as to make them
comprehensible to the French as colonial
subjects not as exotic objects of visual delectation
and thus opens the possibility for them
to be incorporated into a larger French
national identity.
So first a little bit of background about Moulin.
Gelix Jacques Antoine Moulin
was one of the first most well-known
prolific and lauded photographers of the
second empire.
Born in Montreuil-sur-Mer
in 1802 he came to Paris and took up
photography in 1850
running a studio with his wife and
daughter that focused on portraits and
academic nude figure studies.
In 1855 he exhibited at the exposition
Universelel in Paris and won an honorable mention.
His atelier was described in that same
year as quote possibly the most fruitful
and popular of the capital of France and
of the world.
As I mentioned in opening
from 1856 to 1858 he traveled to Algeria
with the official sanction of the
Ministry of War. The albums of
photographs that he produced on that
trip - l'Algérie photographiée - largely photography which he
presented to the emperor upon his return
are the source of his enduring reputation.
His Algerian photographs were also featured
at the 1859 photographic exhibition that
for the first time saw photography and
painting displayed together as part of
the salon.
And here I've just included this is
really just um three images that I found
particularly striking in going through
the um and going through the albums this winter
but they are not really relevant to the
topic at hand.
Soon after his return from Algeria
however in 1862, he attempted to sell his
photographic business to all appearances
he did not officially give it up until
After that, little is known about him
or his life. He vanishes.
So long before Moulin went to Algeria he
had already achieved a reputation as one
of the best and most successful
photographers of his time.
Like many of his contemporaries he
worked across photographic genres
producing both stereoscopic and large
format views of locales around France
and the world and that's one of his
photographs of the Arc de Triomphe,
genre scenes which you see in La Famille
Des laboreurs,
which are inventive scenes using
elaborate costumes and sets and I will
return to this particular
type of photograph in a moment. Um he
also produced carte visite portraits
for anyone who would came into his
studio and requested one as well as of
more famous people
and he did reproductions of works of art,
which you can see in that um Terre cute de Dantan jeune.
Moulin's work garnered high praise from
contemporary critics. In an 1853 review
of his genre photograph one critic went
so far as to declare that if Moulin kept
up his work,
not only quote will he make a name for
himself among artists, he will powerfully
contribute to undercutting the objection
still raised about photography in saying
that it is only a mechanical operation
and that imagination and sentiment have
no role in its results.
Elsewhere, another reviewer went into raptures over
Moulin describing him as quote an artist
in every sense of the word and with few
exceptions, he joins with the sentiment
of art with the interest of the
composition a clear beautiful and
expansive execution.
Moulin was a fine photographer and for
many he was a model of the artistic
heights to which the new medium could aspire.
Now due to a quirk of French censorship
laws, a perhaps unexpected genre was
essential to his artistic reputation.
Under an 1852 censorship decree that
required pre-authorization of visual
materials prior to their sale, hundreds
and potentially thousands it's really
hard to get gauge and accurate count,
of nude photographic images were
authorized for legal sale by the
government. They were then submitted for
the dépôt legal, the copyright system and
allowed to circulate relatively freely
in authorized places of sale.
These kinds of images created an
authorized genre of legal art nudity
that helped to underpin discussions
about photography's art value in the
context of the ongoing debates about it.
They also underpin Moulin's reputation
and success for he was known as one of
the most industrious producers of
legally sanctioned fine art nudes,
executing some really spectacular at
least to my eye, and I've looked at a lot
of them for my first book Académie.
That's the term that was used for art
studies of the nude body uh at the time
predominantly although not exclusively
uh female body.
So here are three early examples of his legally
authorized art nudes.
In fact in the second citation I just
read, it was one of Moulin's nudes that
sent the reviewer into raptures about
his talent. It's the nude at the center
of this slide actually who's pointing
her finger upward.
The author continues in his review to
say that quote, in depriving himself of
the aid of any accessories monsieur
Moulin creates the most remarkable work
naked as even eden modest as innocence
itself a young half-kneeling woman
raises at once her head and arm toward
the sky.
One might say an angel of Milton or
Klopstock or even more so Elsa
of Alfred de Vigny.
There is something simultaneously sweet
and proud in this woman, something
melancholy mystical dreamy.
Moulin's nudes are exemplary of the
different kinds of aesthetic codes
governing the representation of the
female body in second empire French photography.
For instance in this set of three images
we see a classic example of the artist
Académie, the simplest form of nude study
that usually accentuates a stark
contrast between the naked body and a
simple background in the photographer's studio.
However in addition to these austere studies of
the body, Moulin also produced very different
scenes of women
and this is where I returned to the Scène de
Genre, these uh
decorative scenes. He was a master of the
Scène de genre,
the most extravagant form of
storytelling photography of the period
which involved elaborate props costumes
and backgrounds intended to evoke
various settings and historical moments.
Now while the scène de genre did not
necessarily involve female commodities
or models excuse me or nudity and
the first example that I gave on my
first slide is
another kind of scène de genre where
male models are also involved and
there's no nudity at all um.
What we can see in these three images, is
that Moulin's scène de genre often slipped
into nudity.
Even where the female bodies in his scène de
Genre were not entirely nude many of
them played on the appeal of partial or
suggested nudity and we really can see
in this set of three images
that sort of uh continuum from the the
woman who has lifted her legs
um
and then the woman who is half naked
and the woman who is totally
naked. So this is a slight digression
from the topic at hand but relevant and
important to note.
Finally there's another
set of nude images that Moulin
contributed to
in addition to these legally sanctioned
genres, Moulin was also well versed in
more explicit visual
representation of the female body.
Like many photographers of the period he
did not limit himself to legally
authorized nudity. He has the dubious
distinction of being the first
photographer convicted in france for
outrage aux bonnes mœurs
uh essentially indecency or obscenity by
means of photography in 1851.
We will never know whether or not he
continued to make illicit images on the
sly after his conviction because he was not arrested.
But I would say if it's not probable
it's certainly entirely possible that he did.
One thing that we do know is that his
involvement in more explicit forms of
photographic nudity was not a secret to
his contemporaries.
In a laudatory biography from the Revue
Photographique published on the occasion
of the Exposition Universelle in 1855,
Moulin openly confessed to his earlier
activities professing to have turned
over a new and more artistic leaf. He
justified his early académie of the street
by invoking the financial demands of
setting up a studio and finding a
clientele. And so
just to fully contextualize the images
of women that I'm going to talk about
subsequently I have included one
pornographic image uh attributed to Moulin.
It's the most graphic image that I will
show today so that's what's coming up on
the next slide just to give everyone
fair warning. So there it is and that
those kinds of representations of the
sexualized female and sometimes male
body were far less uncommon than we might think in
the 1850s in France.
So all this to say that by the time
Moulin set off for Algeria, his reputation
as a photographer both good and bad was
intimately, very intimately bound up in
the representation of women.
However I have not focused on Moulin's
nudes today merely because of their
importance to his reputation.
Rather I've done so because they are
essential to contextualizing his
photographs taken in Algeria
prior to his travel
to Algeria. Moulin's only engagement with
the orient as it existed in the European
cultural imagination of the time was via
the representation of the female body
which is
entirely unsurprising given
the topics of his photographs and the
nature of
orientalist imaginary.
In the 1850s orientalist scenes
constituted one of the primary
subcategories of Moulin Scene de genre,
heavily featuring nude and semi-nude
women. Here I've included um two examples
uh as we can see in these two
photographs his orientalists scène de genre
are not rooted in a time or place
nor do they ever refer explicitly to
Algeria. Instead like many such
photographs they rely
usually on vague references to various
southern and eastern geographies and
darker skinned peoples as part of their
storytelling about the body.
Moulin's orientalist photographs include
studies with titles that evoke more
specific cultural fictions about the
orient such as
his Esclave pudique
here or Grècque pensive. But they are also
frequently ambiguously titled such as
étude photographique
deploying instead
stereotypical costumes and scenery to
evoke their setting.
Um very uniquely among his peers Moulin also
used two black models a man and a woman
to invoke orientalist settings in these
early studio photographs.
And I will return to the photograph uh
in which he
takes an image of a black woman in a
moment. In all instances however these
photographs are clearly the product of
fantasy determined by contemporary
fictions of the orient rather than
reality.
Yet despite the fact that they are so
evidently fantastic or perhaps precisely
because of their evident ignorance these
set pieces are entirely what one would
expect from a European photographer in
the 1850s and they are in a tradition of
eroticized and exotic representation of
the orient by way of the female body.
Looking only
at these early scène de genre, Moulin fits
squarely in the history of western
photographer's representation of the
Orient from Algeria to Iran.
Ali Bedhad for instance has written in
Camera Orientalis in photography's
orientalism and most recently for Yale
French Studies about eroticized
depictions of women in Iran, Turkey, and
Algeria and the scopic appeal of the
harem fantasy. In Yale French Studies
Bedhad focuses on the photographs of the
Swiss photographer Jean Geiser taken in
Algeria in the second half of the 19th
century.
As he notes in that piece,
Geiser is exemplary of the kinds of
eroticized representations of oriental
women
quote
expected and consumed by a European
audience and so here I've included
one such
lush photograph by Geiser.
Although Moulin's scène de genre were taken
in Paris, there's a strong connection
between them and some of Geiser's more
extravagant photographs taken on
location in Algeria.
Both share detailed costumes
painted backgrounds and a focus on the
body of an alluring and mysterious woman
whether she is naked or not.
And of course the fact that nudity is
not required to make an image erotic has
been widely remarked both by Bedhad and
by other scholars writing on erotic
photography more generally.
The manufactured or
erotic orientalism
of Moulin and Geiser
was reproduced and refined in another
image making mode that dominated visual
culture at the end of the century the
picture postcard and I've included
one example here as well.
These photographs produced after 1895 in
incomprehensible quantities continue to
disseminate fantasies about women of
Algeria and North Africa around the
world.
Actually it is not merely coincidental
that postcards develop the same visual
thematics of Geiser's photographs for
many of his images in fact were
reproduced as postcards including
a number of the images were produced in
the book where I found
this photograph of a postcard which is
Malek Alloula's excellent
work, the colonial harem.
This is all to say that by the time
Moulin traveled to Algeria in 1856 on his
imperially sanctioned photographic
mission, he had already developed a complex
visual language to capture the European
fantasy of an imagined orient,
staged, exotic, erotically charged and
available for mass commercial consumption.
Quite frankly this is the orient that I
expected to find in Moulin's Algerian
albums when I went to look at them
and particularly I expected to find it
in his portraits of women for I think
obvious reasons.
Uh but it is not at all what I found in
those photographs.
So just to start very generally,
here we go,
these are just two images that struck me
from the albums.
The difference between Moulin 's studio
photographs and his Algerian photographs
is as evident as the similarity between
his studio photographs and Geiser's.
In the algerian portraits fantasy has
been displaced by reality.
the backgrounds rather than sumptuous
are hastily invisibly constructed,
often nothing more than blankets or
large pieces of fabric draped behind the
human subjects.
They betray all the difficulties of
working in a foreign location without
the comforts and amenities of the studio.
While the subjects are costumed to a
European audience, the poor lighting and
makeshift setting signals that these
female subjects are not in fact
costumed at all but wearing their own
usual dress no matter how unusual it
might seem for the European viewer.
These photographs are spartan, striking,
and decidedly unseductive.
Precisely because they tend toward the
stark and poorly lit, these photographs
constitute a kind of active
deconstruction of the slights of
lighting, scenery, and costume that go
into the fictionalized orient of studio
photography.
In other words through their mere
existence I would say, they take apart
the orient as such and reconstruct it
with a different reality. In the process
revealing just how ludicrous the
imagined orient was in the first place.
To examine more closely how Moulin's
photographs affect this deconstruction
I'd like to look at a pair of
photographs that are linked by subject
and composition.
One taken in Algeria and one in Paris.
Okay so and I mentioned earlier that I
would return to the scène de genre
um that depicts a black model which is very
rare for the period.
Okay so this image is roughly contemporaneous
with the photograph I showed depicting
the black male model. It's taken in the
same year.
Again and unsurprisingly it is
emblematic of Moulin 's early eroticized
orientalism.
The photographer has placed himself
almost too close to his subjects
particularly for a legally authorized
nude,
creating a false but overwhelming sense
of intimacy.
The leopard skin draped across the sati
and the lush background suggests a
generally exotic interior space into
which the viewer is further drawn by the
close intimacy of the camera.
The lighter skinned model on the right
meets the camera's gaze with a knowing
gleam in her eye and a half smile on her lips.
While the black model hewing to her
constructed role as servant or even as
slave looks away humbly.
All of the necessary tensions of
otherness and exoticized sexuality are
packaged beautifully and according to
contemporary aesthetic strictures for
the pleasure of the viewer.
Here then really are the women imagined
by sex tourists like Flaubert and his
compatriots who set off south and east,
seeking precisely this complicity and
implied compliance. But they have been
repackaged for the Parisian consumer who
cannot leave his home.
Moulin's parallel Algerian portrait could
not be i think more dissimilar.
Obviously one of the most evident
differences
is that the two women in this Algerian
photograph are fully clothed.
Although here I would like to note um
just a little aside and I was discussing
this with Ali before I started the talk,
I have yet to to locate any photographs
that can be definitively attributed to
Moulin taken in Algeria in which women
are not fully clothed.
But again, as I just noted,
the absence or presence of clothing
doesn't determine the erotic charge of
an image.
I would say in this case
um the clothing is just one of many
aspects of the image that strip it of
its erotic charge.
Unlike Moulin, the Parisian photographer
Moulin the Algerian photographer places
himself at a substantial distance from
the subjects marking out his remove from
the women he photographs rather than his
intimacy.
The two women in this photograph have no
interest in their relationship to the
camera or to an implied viewer.
Their expressions are somber, formal, and
close their body language is even closed
off from each other.
Unlike the French models, they make no
contact and there's no fabricated sense
of warmth between the two subjects.
The objects around them are clearly
meant to adorn a makeshift studio that
is not their own personal space and has
been assembled for the purpose of the
portrait.
The second photograph seems almost
designed to show us exactly what is fake
about the first, the false closeness,
between the two women, the lush setting,
the textiles the nudity the complicity
with the viewer all of these components
are essential to the orient sexualized
appeal to European viewers and all are
definitely taken apart and exposed in
the Algerian photograph.
The studio portrait says here is a woman
and her slave, perhaps they can both
belong to you. The Algerian portrait
replaces these statements with a series
of questions that it does not answer: who
are these women, what is their
relationship,
why are they together in this image
although they seem quite uncomfortable
with each other, and where has the
fantasy of the orient gone in the face
of this reality?
There are a number of reasons we can
posit for the vast stylistic gulf
separating Moulin's studio portraits and
his depiction of women in Algeria.
Remarkably and very uniquely Moulin
engaged in a correspondence with the
editors of the photographic publication
la lumiere during his voyage.
The journal printed excerpts and
summaries of his letters in a series of
articles from march to august of 1856.
And these letters shed light on the
various different forces that work in
his photography from North Africa.
They reveal that the practical
the real and the ideological all
contribute to explaining how and why
Moulin's photographs
deconstruct the fantasy of the orient
that is kept so very live in other
imagery of the 19th century.
So I'd like to take a brief detour into
these letters uh before returning to a
final group of photographs in order to
conclude.
At the most basic level, practical
considerations probably played a
significant role in the kinds of
photographs Moulin took during his
travels.
From his very first letter in March of
1856 written just after arriving in
Algeria, he bemoans the technical
difficulties of photographic production
abroad.
The expedition was carrying 1100
kilograms of baggage and photographic
equipment. Water in Algeria was too hard,
too calcified, to be used for developing
solutions and so the expedition had to
use distilled water which was in short
supply.
Moulin spent a considerable amount of
time worrying about preserving in his
own words
his materials from accident even at the
peril of his life
for as he writes, he had to himself at
various moments refrain from drinking
the scant supply of distilled water even
in cases of extreme thirst.
The rainy season lasted longer than
usual in 1856 and made it difficult to
photograph from March through the
beginning of June.
It is little wonder that Moulin's studio
concoctions pull together a more
enticing illusion of verisimilitude than
the portraits he actually took while
traveling.
However Moulin's letters also revealed
that practical considerations alone
cannot explain the divide between his
orientalist studio photographs and his
Algerian ones.
Moulin's conception of his photographic
mission and his understanding of Algeria
in relation to mainland france also
colored his representation of the place
and its people.
Directly upon arrival in Algiers, Moulin
describes the space and the people as
already having been visibly altered by
colonization.
For instance when describing the beauty
of the city he writes
the country is magnificent all of these
houses, mosques, tents stand out against a
vegetation that is vigorous and always
green.
Algiers has lost much of its old
appearance it is difficult for me to aim
my camera without coming across a tiled
roof shutters numbers on the houses
signs and street lights.
All of this creates a stain.
In Algeria, the marks of modernity and in
that modernity marks of the arrival of
european colonizers have already become
a stain upon the inherent beauty of the
place. But aesthetics aside, Moulin is
additionally describing a place that in
reality cannot be as form foreign as
picturesque orientalist representation
requires.
The effects of the European presence
similarly reveal themselves in Moulin's
descriptions of the people of Algeria
in ways that are then more directly
reflected in his female portraits.
In that same first letter, Moulin moves on
from the city and its landscape to its
inhabitants describing a remarkably
mixed population and one that has
already been forced to absorb European
settlers.
Jews, Kabyles, [...], [...] come and go
crossing paths with moorish women who
are always veiled,
a declining population along with the
negresses, the old remains of slavery
whose numbers diminish every day with
French, Spanish, Italian inhabitants.
Sprinkle this picturesque medley with
the severe costumes of our French and
indigenous soldiers. Add to the bizarre
appearance of this heterogeneous
population the incessant confusion
occasioned by dromedaries, transportation
carts pulled by bulls, by omnibuses
pulled by three thin but lively horses,
by diligences of the old kind nearly
gone in France harnessed to five or six
Arabians that burn the pavement,
pass all of these
grotesque scenes through a kaleidoscope
and you will have in front of your eyes
the most complete
Julienne salad that the [...] could
ever have served you.
There's a lot to be said of this passage
and I'd be happy to return to it uh in
the question and answer.
But what struck me purely from the
perspective of this discussion is the
way that Moulin's eye is attuned to the
Julienne vegetables so to speak of many
different people from both North Africa
and Europe
who live in colonial Algeria in 1856. Not
only the spaces then but the people of
the new colony already include the
French. Putting aside the veracity of his
claims about slavery, even they function
to bolster this sense of europeanization.
Implicitly the claim is that the
European presence has led to the decline
in slavery.
Slavery of course was abolished uh
officially in France in
1848 for the second and final time.
Uh in this context any purely exotic
representation would have been a
fabrication unworthy of his role as a
documentarian for the government.
Instead Moulin remarks on the mixture of
the familiar and the strange. He is taken
not by a frisson of voyeurism or
eroticism but of the juxtaposition of
European settlers and native populations.
European and native ways of being.
And finally,
in addition to the demands of
practicality in the pressures of reality
Moulin's letter reveal intense
ideological pressure. Moulin undertook his
trip with the government's blessing and
letters of introduction. The French
government
in return placed implicit demands on his
photographic output. Moulin was not in
Algeria simply to document it. He was
supposed to do so on behalf of the
country's colonizing mission and for a
French audience to make Algeria legibly
French for that audience.
Now Moulin himself does not openly
acknowledge these demands but they frame
the presentation of his letters in la
lumiere in the first installation of
Moulin's correspondence. For instance, the
publication introduces the series by
proclaiming that Moulin was traveling to
Algeria to bring back quote,
precise and little-known documents on
the customs, the varied attire, the
habitation of the diverse populations
agglomerated in the cities
on the monuments on the sites etc of our
great African colony.
This idea of a mission intended to
create a greater sense of French
ownership over and identification with
colonial territories is even more
explicit in a notice reprinted from a
colonial newspaper alongside one of his
later letters from June of 1856.
The notice invokes his official sanction
and describes the expedition's goals in
overtly nationalistic terms.
We read in [...]
Monsieur Moulin, the very distinguished
photographer from Paris who has come to
Africa under the auspices of the
Ministry of War to capture the most
interesting sites of the country has
already gathered remarkable material in
our province. His work, when complete, must
necessarily contribute very much to
popularizing Algeria.
Orientalist fantasy might sell
photographs in Paris but Moulin had not
had doors open to him in Algeria in
service to his commercial ambitions. He
was there to popularize the space and
the people for France and in service to
a greater French identity. He was not
there to indulge in the voyeurism of the
exotic.
The result of this nexus of conflicting
forces
means that Moulin was being asked
essentially to photograph in a foreign
place under difficult circumstances in
such a way
that the photographs would entice
viewers back home but not be so exotic
that those viewers would reject the new
kind of Frenchness he was bringing
back.
Ultimately this paradoxical necessity
that the other must be also somehow
rendered familiar
or at the very least
acceptably exotic for a French audience
is I think precisely what imbues Moulin's
female portraits with such a distinctive
perspective and what propels his
deconstruction of the illusions of
orientalism.
So by way of conclusion, I'd like to take
a final look at one last triptych
from the albums from Algeria. It's a set
of group portraits of young women that
encapsulate the conflicting demands at
work in Moulin's photographs.
The subject of this triptych is
deceptively unassuming for it is
extremely rare for Moulin to photograph
the same subject multiple times. So
however unassuming, it's clearly
significant.
He produced three very similar images of
a group of young women at school.
The photographs aren't very good in
aesthetic terms.
They are not well composed. The girls are
very modestly dressed and also not very
clear to the camera and the scene is
chaotic.
Instead of the harem that Moulin's early
studio photograph suggests he should
have or would have photographed or
indeed attempted to invent, he offers the
viewers a gender-segregated space of
learning.
Ironically, such a scene is in some sense
its own kind of fantasy for literacies
uh literacy and education were still out
of reach for the majority of French
women at the time.
Still, if the scene is a fantasy it is a
very different kind of fantasy than the
one that we would have expected and
would have been expected at the time.
And the photographs exposed perfectly
the way that the ideological real and
practical demands of a voyage shifted
Moulin's photography away from his
earlier modes of representation.
The studio background is both a reminder
of the practical considerations at work
in travel photography and a nod to the
reality that he was actually working
outside of the studio far from Paris.
The mixture of people of races and
cultures in the image including the fact
that
the white
people are in relative positions of
power reflects the same diversity that
Moulin saw in the streets of Algiers and
the way that diversity was ideologically
advantageous to the French when it
foregrounded their power.
And the familiar place and structure of
a school setting provide a recognizable
framework through which the French might
understand the strange and exotic
subjects of the photograph.
In sum,
the orient has disappeared and in its
place we are left with French colonial
Algeria.
So to conclude, in Moulin's Algerian
portraits the aesthetics of Orientalism
are deconstructed in service to other
goals.
Of course that is not to say that his
photograph somehow engage in a radically
egalitarian depiction of Algeria. They
are the work of a colonial photographer
which brings its own set of baggage
nor do his photographs ever entirely
bridge the gulf between the French
viewer and the Algerian subjects that he
represents, for whatever the demands of
legibility are,
the subjects continue to be strange for
a European audience.
Indeed as much as these photos stand
outside from the parallel tradition of
erotic orientalist studio portraiture of
women exposing such representations as
fictions, they did not dampen the
subsequent power of those fictions.
Geiser's photographs and millions of
picture postcards aided by better studio
settings and improved technologies
continued to perpetuate those fictions
around the world.
Far more people by the end of the
century would have been familiar with
the Algerian represented on postcards,
Algerian women represented on postcards
than those represented in Moulin's albums.
Yet for all the way thatMoulin's
female portraits do not or cannot
entirely turn the viewer away from
entrenched orientalist modes of seeing,
they nonetheless embody their own
particular set of ideological and
aesthetic imperatives.
They are not more truthful
for I would– I would say they're more
accurate but they are no less
constructed.
What they do is point to a reality
structured around a different set of
ideological impulses one that value ones
that value cultural integration of
colonial possessions over the impulse to
exoticize and eroticize.
And in opening up a counter dialogue to
more manicured set pieces of
Orientalistic exoticism, they also
whatever their shortcomings, offer a
glimpse of other modes of seeing and a
glimpse of the way that photography's
uncanny realism can expose many
realities working at cross purposes and
each offering a different narrative
about the world and a framework for
seeing it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much
for that wonderful talk. Um it really
enjoyed um listening to it. I wanna thank
you so much um
for really joining us today. I mean,
fascinating talk, very interesting Raisa
and and thank the audience for for
joining us this webinar. I hope we can
continue the discussion um in future
venues and hopefully in person
um you know and thanks again and
have a wonderful
evening.
Thank you