The visual sociology of Pierre Bourdieu – Uses of the archive
The photographs in the archive were – with few exceptions – taken by Pierre Bourdieu between 1957 and 1961 in Algeria and between 1961 and 1962 in Lasseube (Béarn, France). After being drafted as a soldier during the Algerian War in the mid-1950s, Bourdieu, shocked by the systematic destruction of Algerian culture under the French colonial regime, undertook his first self-taught field research in Kabylia. Employing ethnological research methods, he sought to understand local society in its concrete lived realities, cultural particularities, and social experiences, aiming to make them comprehensible to people back home in France.
Pierre Bourdieu with camera
(later discovery, not archived)
Even during his military service, he began work on his first book Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958). Between 1958 and 1959, Bourdieu worked as an assistant in philosophy at the Faculté des Lettres at the University of Algiers, founded in 1879. During this time, Bourdieu took several thousand photographs. As he reported, the view through his camera’s lens allowed him to critically and distantly objectify the observed social practices and cultural phenomena and, through a conversion of his gaze onto this foreign social world, to achieve a reflective distance from his native French everyday world. At the same time, his goal was to document the values and ideas of Algerian society, threatened by the violence of the colonial system, and to protect them from being forgotten through his photographic sociology. His focus was on the various economic, social, cultural, and symbolic forms of colonial violence and the cultural dispossession of the Algerians. This visual documentation confronts the viewer with the collapse of family structures, the consequences of mass unemployment, and widespread precarity. Above all, Bourdieu aimed to capture in images the effects of a brutal "clash of civilizations", manifested in the broken habitus of uprooted people.
These photographic testimonies, now made fully publicly accessible for the first time, open a view onto a long-ignored side of Bourdieu’s oeuvre and stand in close interrelation and complementarity with his long-intensively studied ethnographic and social theoretical works from the early phase of his career:
“The interpretive gaze of the ethnologist with which I observed Algeria, I was also able to apply to myself, to the people from my homeland, to my parents, [...]. I approached these people, who are very similar to the Kabyles and with whom I spent my childhood, with the understanding gaze that is essential to ethnology and defines it as a discipline. Photography, which I initially practiced in Algeria and later in Béarn, undoubtedly contributed greatly as a companion to this conversion of the gaze (...)” [Pierre Bourdieu. In Algerien. Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung, 2009, UVK Konstanz, S. 11, trans. by the authors of this website with AI support].
The exceptional situation in Algeria profoundly sharpened Bourdieu’s view of society. His various publications allow us to trace how intensively he repeatedly used these photographic testimonies, even decades after his experiences in Algeria, as a source of inspiration in his sociological studies. Photography helped him to “generate questions” and “construct objects,” providing important impulses for further research.
In a way, the photographic testimonies became a kind of visual notebook and, alongside systematic knowledge acquisition and documentation, enabled Bourdieu to approach the people who allowed themselves to be photographed and who, in return, received their portraits. The added value of photographic “field notes” compared to written ones likely lies in the fact that the visual testimonies allow the viewer to participate sensually and concretely in the recorded situation and to “read” it easily through their statements. More importantly, these photographs were always accompanied by written field notes taken simultaneously, and both forms of field research together form an inseparable whole.
Furthermore, it is worth recalling Bourdieu’s diverse scientific uses of photography:
“Photography thus served him as an instrument, method, and means of insight in his research and then became the starting point for a gradual expansion of his ‘visual sociology’ into the field of research ‘about’ photography in his well-known study ‘An Illegitimate Art,’ leading up to the extensive and systematic use of visual documents in his journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales or works such as Distinction” [Mit dem Objektiv sehen: Im Umkreis der Photographie - Ein Gespräch zwischen Pierre Bourdieu und Franz Schultheis, Collège de France, Paris, 26. Juni 2001, trans. by the authors of this website with AI support]. By actively and systematically employing photography as part of his research concepts to observe, describe, and analyze social phenomena – and consistently using it as an instrument of scientific inquiry – Bourdieu expanded the social sciences’ research repertoire to include original empirically photographic image practices.
This visual component of Bourdieu’s work – one of the most prominent in the social sciences of the 20th century – has not yet been adequately appreciated, since only a fraction of his photo archive and the extensive related documents were accessible at the Pierre Bourdieu Archive at the Université de Condorcet in Paris. Public access to the archive now makes it possible to reconstruct in detail the intense interweaving of visual and discursive approaches characteristic of his work. His images cannot be read without their accompanying theoretical descriptions and analyses, and his theories rely so heavily on the systematic use of images that it is worthwhile to focus more strongly on this dyadic relationship in the future.