Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance

This essay recasts photographic creation and consumption from a postcolonial feminist perspective. It begins with a reflection on nineteenth-century legal debates regarding how to define the authorship of photographic imagery. It goes on to consider the work of French portraitist Marc Garanger, who shot identity card portraits of Algerians for the French military during the Algerian revolution . Finally, this essay asks how the Algerian-French novelist Leïla Sebbar engages with the photographic gaze in her literary work. It concludes that Sebbar devises creative strategies for misrecognizing "wounding" colonial imagery by seizing on the ambivalence and ferocity of women's looks.