[b]»Our images of one another reflect each other like distorting mirrors but we have to live nonetheless as if we see clearly.«[/b]
Zella Luria in »Le fait féminin«

Over the last few years violence has become a central issue in press reports on Algerian women and has also frequently been addressed in the French-speaking press. Rape, sexual harassment or domestic violence are no longer taboo subjects but have become part of national discourse. »Women raped by terrorists « (»Liberté«, 16th June 2005), »Violence against women goes unpunished« (»El Watan«, 15th December 2005), »Violence against women – horrifying figures« (»L’Expression«, 15th December 2005) – just a few of the headlines that hit the front pages of daily papers in 2005. Whilst reports on these acts of violence appeared regularly, it seems interesting to examine this conscious discourse with reference to the photos selected, the choice of words and the hierarchisation of information, as well as in terms of the analytic filters used to describe the violence. Let us start by analysing the photos that accompany these articles, for they are the first message received by readers or passers-by at newspaper kiosks. What does one see on these photos?

[b]Photos of suffering women or the anti-photo[/b]
On the front page of the 16th June 2005 edition of »Liberté«, the following image appears under the headline »Silence and humiliation – women raped by terrorists«: four women, three of whom are in hijab; the faces of the latter are blurred, whilst the woman without a headscarf is photographed with her back towards readers. All four are sitting on the ground and the caption reads: »Ten years after the drama that shook their bodies, they are still suffering. They have not been granted full victim status and they withdraw into their pain.«

It seems that the four women are taking part in a meeting of activists (almost certainly the mothers of the disappeared), but in contrast, the article that the photos illustrate has nothing to do with the women’s actual situation.

On the front page of the daily paper »El Watan« dated 15th December 2005 we see a woman whose face is entirely covered by a leopard-print headscarf, under the headline »Inequality supported by the law«; kneeling, she protects her face with both hands whilst a man standing with his back to the camera threatens her with a heavy belt.
To judge by the woman’s surreal re-enactment of the stance of a battered woman, this photo is certainly a montage as imagined by the photographer. There is something profoundly humiliating in this pose: she waits passively to be struck.

On the front page of the 15th December 2005 edition of »L’Expression«, addressing the same topic as »El Watan«, a colour photo of a young woman wearing black trousers is visible under the headline »Violence against women« and the tag-line »Horrific figures«. She is wearing plastic sandals on her bare feet, sitting on a ramshackle bed with white sheets and hiding her face in her hands as if she were crying. Her long black hair serves the role of a hijab. The photo caption reads: »The phenomenon of violence against women is becoming more pronounced in Algeria due to a lack of legal protection or organisations working on the issue. The changes brought about by reform of the Family Code do not go far enough.«

The same edition contains another photo once again portraying a woman in a hijab and wearing a headscarf: her eyes are effaced by a black strip and she is sitting on the ground surrounded by plastic bags. The caption to the photo reads: »An upsurge in violence against women.«
On the front page of the 23rd November 2005 edition of »Liberté«, two women are portrayed sitting on armchairs in front of a wall under the headline »Violence against women, 4,000 victims in six months«. One of them is crying, her face buried in her hands, the other bows her head and under her headscarf a blurred mosaic is visible rather than her face. Only one woman is standing as if bearing witness: she is wearing a blouse, trousers and a headscarf, but does not have a face either. Caption: »Statistics published by the state police for the second and third quarter of 2005 show a marked increase in attacks in public, which make up over 70 per cent of all such incidents.«

On the front page of the 19th November 2005 edition of »Liberté«, alongside the headline »Motherhood in Algeria – an alarming situation« a woman is shown wearing a hijab and a white blouse. She bends over a tin cradle in which a newborn baby is lying. Her face is not visible. Women do not have a right to a face even when fulfilling their ascribed role.

[b]Conscious discourse and unconscious images[/b]
One could go on at length describing the strange images of women on the front pages of newspapers. At first they seem familiar and unambiguous, but when one looks more closely a particular details hits us and refuses to release us from its grip: none of these women have a face, they have no gaze, and they have no eyes.

Their faces are blurred and rendered unrecognisable by black strips printed across them – a technique that is beginning to vanish with the spread of Photoshop, which allows for more discreet image-processing.
The press people have several explanations at the ready to justify this methodical camouflage for women’s faces, which has now almost become standard practice. The first relates to the women’s desire not to have their photos published, particularly if they are facing problems. They are reluctant to authorise use of the photos for fear of being recognised. Several newspapers were sued or threatened with court proceedings for »infringement of privacy«, which made the publishers cautious. Another explanation relates to the status of photos and photographers in the Algerian press, where images do not constitute an independent source of information but are just illustrations accompanying the text. Often the situations described have nothing to do with the photos illustrating the text, which actually come from a different context. This stands in contradiction to standards in force in the professional press everywhere else in the world. The only way for publishers to get round this difficulty is by blurring the faces and rendering them anonymous, particulary when addressing sensitive issues such as human dramas, taboos relating to the female body, women’s integrity and dignity, rape, sexual harassment or prostitution. As a result, women who have exposed themselves to the photographer’s flashlight in order to render their private drama public and place it in a political context, in other words the victims of the »national tragedy«, the »mothers of the disappeared« or the »families of the victims of terrorism«, often find their photos being used to illustrate articles that have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic the women themselves are addressing and for which they are prepared to reveal their identity. The publishers’ conscious decision to modify the photos in this way simply aims to protect the women and to guarantee anonymity for them, at least that’s how the argument goes.

These are some of the explanations given to justify the improper use of blurred, out-of-focus images – in order to make this run-of-the-mill, to normalise it and no longer call this technique into question, as if it did not have any kind of influence on the image of women. What interest could there possibly be in publishing photographs on which scarcely anything can be identified? It is like giving a reader a coded text to decipher. Why publish something that could almost be called an anti-photo? Isn’t the purpose of a photo to show, to »make others see«? It is not exactly harmless to publish images month after month showing women without a face, without eyes: a photo is also information. But what information lies behind the photos that show what cannot be shown?

These photos that do not show what they wish to show nonetheless convey an image to us – an unconscious image of women suffering. The images tell us that women who have suffered violence to their bodies, to their dignity, must remain concealed. Unconsciously these out-of-focus photos reinforce the prejudices that the press ascribes to society, which purportedly sees women as being »guilty«, of having brought »shame« on their family, their town, their district.

Unconsciously the press has internalised this stance and perpetuates it, despite believing it is condemning this point of view. This autonomy of the photo as language reveals the ambivalence of the press, torn between conscious discourse and the unconscious image. Whilst the conscious discourse, the written, is outraged at the »shame« and »the humiliation« that forces the women to »suffer in silence« and condemns this, the unconscious image reinforces the »shame« with these faces that look as if they had been gnawed away by leprosy.
What would happen if a »recognised victim« also had a face, eyes that looked around and told a story, a sad identity? And if being recognised as a victim also signified the right to have a face?
[...]

[b]The birth of the individual woman[/b]
The Algerian press plays an important role in shaping public opinion and denouncing the authorities’ inability to fight effectively against the injustices and inequalities that affect Algerian women. On the basis of statistical information, general data pooled from several sources ¹, the press conveys an image of women in Algeria as nothing more than victims. The choice of photos speaks for itself; the women on the photographs are sitting more often than standing and we see them crying rather than fighting. Here the women will not be made responsible for this situation, which is all too real. But doesn’t the saying go: »the road to Hell is paved with good intentions«? The dominant image of Algerian women is a negative one that always describes them as suffering. Raped, beaten, humiliated and exposed women - those are the topics that hit the headlines and whilst newspapers condemn these shameful acts, at the same time this is precisely what sells newspapers – as is true of all suffering. It is fair to say that although the print media record the various types of injustice that women experience, they nonetheless do not succeed in drawing on explanatory tools that could give these injustices a broader meaning. In merely describing these suffering and given how difficult it is to explain them, everything functions to suggest that these injustices are the inescapable fate of Algerian women. Articles appealing to »tradition«, »values« and »ignorance« do not allow editors, who often act in good faith, to take their leave of the image of women as »life-long minors«.
This conception, conceived in the singular yet referring to millions of destinies and extremely different histories, does not make it possible for the birth of the individual woman to penetrate public consciousness, or indeed for social, cultural and economic differentiation to do so. Despite consciously adopting pro-women stances, editors in the print media are not immune to the inherited ideas and prejudices that they lambast in »society« yet sometimes unconsciously reproduce themselves. Everything awakens the impression that the sudden presence of the »reality of women«² in the public sphere, encompassing phenomena ranging from their struggles to their comments right through to women’s visibility in schools, at work or on the streets, is recorded nowadays like an introductory chapter establishing the facts. However other chapters still need to be written to free Algerian woman from the singular form and allow her to appear in the plural. Only then will it be possible to develop an unprejudiced understanding of the complexity of the changes.

Perhaps the requisite period of taking note will be followed by a period of examining the meaning, an examination that allows women to appear in a different light from what we see through distorted mirrors, imprecise statistics and ideological discourses.

The unabridged original version of this text was published in »Naqd«, No. 22/23 (2006), as well as in documenta magazines’ online journal (http://magazines.documenta.de).

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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