Algeria Torturata : a counter-archive of colonial atrocities during the Algerian war of independence

‘No, these photographs were not taken from albums illustrating the horrors of Nazi camps. They were taken since the war in Algeria began’. So reads the first line of Aziz Izzet’s introduction to Algeria Torturata, a photo-illustrated essay published in Milan, Italy in 1961 at the height of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). With this sentence, Izzet activates for European readers an indelible visual archive of mass suffering associated with Nazi crimes during World War II. This analogy, however, was more than a moral indictment that aligned French colonial practices with the forms of violence most widely condemned in postwar Europe. It also positioned the photographs in Algeria Torturata within a juridical framework established through the prosecution of Nazi crimes, directing viewers to understand them as evidence, rather than as shocking representations of violence intended solely to provoke moral outrage. But despite Izzet’s effort to frame the images in Algeria Torturata as evidence, the photographs never entered the evidentiary record of the war. This article argues that the book’s limited institutional visibility accounts for that failure, and that the photographs in Algeria Torturata visually corroborate the broader structures of colonial violence that governed the Algerian War.