The Orient Deconstructed: Moulin's Female Portraits in Algeria, 1856-1858

In 1856, the Parisian photographer Félix Jacques-Antoine Moulin traveled to Algeria on a photographic mission sanctioned by the French Imperial government. Before he left, Moulin had already garnered a reputation as a prolific photographer of women, including nudes, portraits and genre scenes. This talk will put his female portraits taken in North Africa with his earlier Orientalist nudes and genre scenes of women, arguing that the later photographs in Algeria reveal the degree to which his earlier photographs were the product of a cultural imaginary about the Orient that broke down in the face of the reality of North Africa. Instead, his portraits of Algerian women reveal a conflicting imperative to render the people of Algeria in visual terms that would allow them to be incorporated into a larger colonial French national identity.