ALGERIA, CONQUERED BY POSTCARD: Review

• Published in: The New York times 1987
• Main Authors: Shloss, Carlos, Carol Shloss's most recent books are "Gentlemen Photographers: The Work of Loring Underwood and William Lyman Underwood" and "In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer."
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: ALLOULA, MALEK; Godzich, Myrna; Godzich, Wlad; Harlow, Barbara; SHLOSS, CAROL
• ISSN: 0362-4331

Beyond doubt, many of these images are tawdry, and Mr. [Alloula] has arranged them in an increasing order of degradation, ending his book with what he calls an ''anthology of breasts'': women, naked to the waist, peer out of the postcards accompanied by captions like ''Want to party, honey?'' or ''Oh! Is it ever hot!'' or ''The Cracked Jug.'' The ordinarily hidden is made brutally visible; the private is perverted and made public. The model, Mr. Alloula tells us, ''in selling the image of her body . . . sells at the same time . . . the image of the body of Algerian women as a whole.'' ''These raided bodies are the spoils of victory, the warrior's reward.'' They are a surrogate for political and military conquest. Mr. Alloula's motive in writing this book and in compiling these images is, in his own words, to return ''this immense postcard to its sender.'' It is a belated form of confrontation with the French, or as [Barbara Harlow], an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote the book's excellent introduction, suggests, a ''challenge and riposte.'' Through it Mr. Alloula reclaims a lost sense of honor; he recoups a former oppression - an oppression, he says unabashedly, that he takes personally: ''What I read on these cards does not leave me indifferent.