Algiers, in more than 30 photographs, is southern Mediterranean, North African, Berber, Arabic, French, religious, secular, post-colonial, bustling, intimate, architectural, organic. Jean-Pierre Hautecouer spent from 2004-2007 in the city and lived in the old sector, the casbah. Charles Martin visited Algiers during the summer, 2009, a guest of the Algerian Ministry of Culture for the 2nd Pan African Festival (PANAF 2009) of Algiers. He contributed photographs and an essay to the current issue of the New York University journal Black Renaissance (10.1, Spring 2010). Hautecoeur’s photographs are part of a global work incorporated into a film co-directed with the French journalist Anne Cazalès in 2007.
The casbah can be thought of as a “town inside a city” with codes and rituals of its own. Its singular way of life emanates from cool patios, gardens with fountains, jasmine and precious architecture in old Muslim and Turkish houses, hammams (steam baths), collective living, sharing, and a high art of café conversation that takes pleasure in argument and humor, alike. UNESCO has registered this section of Algiers as elemental to world heritage. Even so, the casbah faces social crisis as it has become a place where the impoverished come to live, unable to rent housing elsewhere. Today the casbah is almost in ruins in parts and without clear leadership to resolve its issues. At the same time, Algiers is a modern, prosperous city, sprawling and doing business with the continent and much of the world.