Among the diverse array of small-scale exhibitions scattered through the halls of the Pompidou Center's National Museum of Modern Art (MNAM), one series is particularly eye-catching. Because of its subject matter – Algeria, photographed from 1957 to 1961, in the years of France's war there – and the man behind the photos, renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), as well as the screening of the recently-completed film L'Enquête Bourdieu. Le Ricochet des Images, ("The Bourdieu Investigation. The Ricochet of Images"), by French-Algerian artist Katia Kameli. In addition, some of the observation and analysis sheets, written by Bourdieu during this period, are on display – documents that are inseparable from his photos. Finally, a book on the subject, Images d'Algiers. Une Affinité Elective ("Pictures from Algiers. A Selective Affinity") has been reprinted for the occasion.

The story behind these photos is an episodic one: Having first been called up to serve as a soldier in Algeria, in 1955, Bourdieu, as a young man who had just completed a degree in philosophy, stayed on as an assistant at the university in Algiers – where he became involved in sociology, the discipline he would later help to reform. Among the villages of the Kabylia region; in the streets of Algiers and Blida; amid the "regroupment camps," to which the French army displaced the villagers, Bourdieu observed and, to get a better view, took photographs. He was equipped with a Zeiss Ikoflex 6 × 6 camera he had bought in Germany and, as he himself confessed, had "smuggled in" to the country. Florian Ebner, head of MNAM's photography department and curator of the exhibition, estimated that Bourdieu had returned to France with around 3,000 negatives: "Some of them were lost, probably during moves, which means there are prints whose negatives have disappeared. We have all those that exist."

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