Review
"In Algeria, where photography is both a taboo and a potential weapon, Graffenried's silent, hidden camera and swift footwork allow for the only possible safe working method. The results form a dramatic and original view of daily life in a society wracked by civil war."--Patricia Strathern, Reportage

"Working under adverse and potentially dangerous circumstances, in a culture that profoundly distrusts cameras, Michael von Graffenried has assembled an extraordinarily compelling portrait of the people of modern Algeria."--Carol Squiers, American Photo



Book Description
"These images, snatched by Graffenried without having been aimed, for to raise a camera to one's eye is to put one's life in danger, testify to a truth that no one is showing, that of daily fear and furor that you won't see on the six o'clock news."--Robert Delpire, Director of the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, from his Foreword

Michael von Graffenried, an award-winning Swiss photographer, covertly photographed civil strife in Algeria from the early 1990s through 1998. In a land where Islamic terrorists have executed over sixty journalists and photographers in the last seven years, Graffenried's very survival is remarkable. His extraordinary accomplishment, however, is these photographs, which form a composite of Algeria that is more whole than the nation itself, fractured by one segment of the population in favor of democracy and another in favor of an Islamic state.

Graffenried makes his pictures secretly, using an antique Widelux panoramic camera with a hidden lens. He would risk his picture and his life were he to raise a camera to his eyes. Instead, he shoots from the hip, with his hands clasped over what looks like a pair of binoculars. In learning to frame his photographs without a viewfinder, he opens himself to a rich array of surprise and irony in his pictures, and reveals a society that has been concealed from the international community for nearly seven years.



About the Author
Michael von Graffenried was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1957. He is a self-taught freelance photographer based in Paris. His work has appeared in thirteen books and numerous international magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Life, Paris Match, Le Monde, Geo, and The International Herald Tribune. He has contributed to many television programs in Europe. He received a World Press Photo award in 1989 for his reportage on perestroika in the Moscow art scene. During the 1990s, his photographic projects took him to the Middle East, Cuba, Slovenia, the Baltics, China, Vietnam, the Sudan, Haiti, and Algeria. His photographs are held in several permanent museum collections and are exhibited internationally. In the United States he is represented by the Witkin Gallery in New York City.

Mary-Jane Deeb is the editor of The Middle East Journal and a professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at American University in Washington, D.C. The author of Libya's Foreign Policy in North Africa (Westview Press, 1990), she is working on a book entitled Algeria: A State in Evolution. She is a frequent media commentator, with appearances on CNN, ABC World News, and the CBS Evening News.

FROM THE PUBLISHER