Picturing Algeria

In this posthumous volume, editors Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli showcase the ethnographic photography of eminent French sociologist Bourdieu (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste), juxtaposing photos taken in Algeria from 1957 to 1960 alongside some of his notebook pages and published text. For an untrained photographer, Bourdieu (1930–2002) created breathtaking pictures, capturing a world in flux through the casual moments of everyday life, as well as the striking mix of ancient and modern: cars share the same road as tanks and farmers work against a backdrop of high-tension wires. However, there’s little new material besides the images, and the essays by the editors and New York University’s Craig Calhoun are dense and recursive compared to Bourdieu’s own prose, which is only presented through excerpts from a previously published interview and selections from his earlier publications. For those familiar with Bourdieu, there’s little incentive to read on, despite the book serving as a memorial for a revolutionary thinker whose insights helped shaped contemporary sociology. (May)