Family Photographs
Restoration
Bourdieu placed his early ethnographic research in Algeria and Béarn retrospectively in a reciprocal relationship that is central to his way of dealing with photography. [1] In Algeria he studied the exodus of traditional society, and his interest and probably also his intuitive understanding of this process was due, not least of all, to the fact that this transformation also applied to social structures familiar to him from his home region of Béarn. Together with Abdelmalek Sayad, whom he had met at the university in Algiers, after his return from Algeria he pursued something like an inversion of the famous project of the “sad tropics”, an inverse ethnography to “observe the effects that objectification of my native world would produce in me” [2] . He found the “sad peasants” of Béarn, whose cultural values were exposed to a process of devaluation due to the urban, modernized version of the neighboring class, the classes moyennes [3] , increasingly defined by consumption.
