Photograph, Beautiful Fatima Photography was critical to
imperialism. The French army (and the British army in India)
employed the camera’s lens to chronicle military exploits, first
in Algeria during the 1850s, and later in Tunisia and Morocco.
With advances in photographic technology, portrait studios were
established in Europe and in European empires. Most studio
photography in this period produced family portraits that were
staged and arranged by the photographer. However, as the demand
for images of non-Western exotic peoples, particularly of women,
swelled in Europe and elsewhere, postcards illustrated with
posed studio photographs were produced by the tens of thousands.
By the late nineteenth century in Algeria and elsewhere,
contrived photographic images of the “Arab woman” or “la
Mauresque” [The Moorish woman]who was provocatively presented
either covered or uncoveredwere widely produced. Many were done
in studios in Algiers (or in France or Europe) and employed the
same stage “props”—water pipes, or