Gazing at the Colonial Gaze: Photographic Observation and Observations on Photography Based on a Comparison between Aspects of the Work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron

Abstract

The paper was provoked by viewing various selections of the photos taken by Bourdieu in Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part considers three stages in the production and consumption of Bourdieu's photos. The possibility that the third of these stages – the gallery display of Bourdieu's photos in the present – might be a betrayal of the sociology of photography and of art galleries that Bourdieu attempted in the 1960s leads to the discussion of the second part of the paper. Part 2 first contextualises the work on photography undertaken within the Centre de Sociologie Européenne in the early 1960s and then, secondly, discusses the emergence of divergent sociologies of photography in the work of Bourdieu and Passeron. The purpose of the discussion is to ask which of the theories of photography which developed in association with Bourdieu's photographic activity now enables us better to respond to Bourdieu's photographic products.