"From the Colonial Harem" - Malek Alloula

Paragraph 1: 'The Orient as Stereotype and Phantasm'

Within the colonial context, phantasms of the Western rose out of its subjects ashes. The significant player inside these obsessions was 'The Harem'. When Orientalist paintings started to lose their status, photography took it over. With the popularity of the (travel) postcard, this phantasms could be shared even within the working class for a minimum price. Knowing this is probably their only contact with the East, these postcards provide an alternative narrative for the colonisation and the eastern culture. It shows the Western perception, the colonial vision, of it. And with the visualisation it defends it. These photographs have to be seen as part of a wide propaganda project. They degraded the East through their fantasies and mysterious representation of the Harem. 

It is important today to look at these postcards and photographs with a critical eye. An alternative reading would be a 'symptomatic' one. Now we can expose the obsessive scheme, the ideology of colonialism, that lays under these pictures. Let it be an educational lesson we get out of it. Some say that they are merely visual documentation to enrich the Western ethnography. Nevertheless, it is a disturbing fact that the 'algérienne' and her setting have been photographed and represented to a public in such a scale that is not comparable with other societies. The west had the boldness to claim the right of sight, to highlight their bodies in an erotic way. Malek Alloula explains that looking at these sort of representations is a "double operation: first, to uncover the nature and meaning of the colonialist gaze; then, to subvert the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women." 

Paragraph 2: 'Women from the outside; obstacle and transparency'

When a foreign, Western gaze looks at the Algerian women he notices that his view is blocked by the veil that covers her. This, for the photographer, can be seen as a rejection what results in a huge disappointment. Alloula calls this " the discourage of the scopic desire". Besides desire, it is also the rejection of the photographer's practice of art and his place. Because of this, the photographer feels challenged by these women and make it his life's work to unveil them with his lens. 

The veil becomes a symbol of blindness and masking to the photographer. It is their uniform, the object that unifies them. With the photographer as an outsider, he is eager to show this unified group of veiled women. The paradox here is that "the veiled subject becomes the purport of an unveiling." Though in the Algerian culture the veil has another function: the closure of private space and the extension of this to the public space. 

This imaginary harem for the photographer is a scandal. It also confirms to him the 'taboo' of "figural depiction of the human body prohibited by Islam." Suddenly the realisation comes that when the photographer's gaze is blocked, the situation can counter so that he himself can become an 'object-to-be-seen'. Because in the presence of these veiled women is also their gaze through the veil. Now the photographer has lost the right over his own gaze and feels threatened. His response to this is violent. He has the will to unveil them and give a pictorial form to the forbidden.