Interview with Marc Garanger – New York Photo Festival 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award from New York Photo Festival on Vimeo.

In my last blog, I posted, without much personal comment, an image and link to Photographer Marc Garanger’s stunning photographs of Algerian women taken in the 1960s. I found these images shocking, having never seen anything like them, from that time or now. I found them more surprising than seeing raw, but ubiquitous nakedness, twisted pornography, or horrific war images. What I saw in the photographs was deep anger, subversion, a keeping-of-self beyond what could be done to one’s exterior. I saw the future in the making.

In this Vimeo, Garanger speaks passionately about his 1960 portraits of Algerian women “Femme Algérienne,” shot 1960—62 during the French/Algerian War, under duress (both his and theirs), for identity cards.

Garanger, forced to make the women show their faces in public, often for the first time, turned an act of cultural imperialism into a raw depiction of beauty and sublime dignity. Garanger returned to Algeria four decades later to foster a discussion within the same communities around these photographs.

Marc Garanger received the New York Photo Festival Lifetime Achievement Award.

Credits:
Directed and Edited by Sebastien Cros
Sound and Music by Johann Levasseur
Production UKOSO 2010