Photo exhibiton Pierre Bourdieu

22 January 2009. The pictures by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu document life in resettlement camps and slums during the Algerian War in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition underlines the explosive power of Bourdieu’s societal analysis and his criticism of the social consequences of economic change.

A parallal workshop and film program goes to the heart of the current debate on the notion of “precarity”, which was coined by Bourdieu.

Pictures published after death
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was among the most-read and most-quoted sociologists of the 20th century. His pictures from the Algerian War gathered dust in crates for almost 40 year before they were published after his death.

Social effects of the war
The black and white photographs bear witness to a war-torn country. They provide evidence of, among other things, the social effects of the war, the social status of men and women, as well as living conditions in town and country. For Bourdieu himself, the field studies acted as a trigger for his work as a sociologist.