Photograph Found Outside the Algerian Consulate, London, 7 June 2010

And this is where my journey began over a month ago, picking up stray photos from the pavement outside the Algerian Consulate in London as I waited for a visa.

Postcard Sent by Parvati Nair and Received by John Perivolaris on His Return to the UK (Verso)

Postcard Sent by Parvati Nair and Received by John Perivolaris on His Return to the UK

Receipt for Photograph of John Perivolaris Taken at Studio Chérifi, Annaba, 30 June 2010. Cost 80 Dinars

Photograph of John Perivolaris Taken at Studio Chérifi, Annaba, 30 June 2010. Cost: 80 Dinars

Afterimage 4: Photograph Found on a Street in Paris, 10 June 2010

Independence Day, Algiers

Independence Day and my last day in Algiers. Half-hearted celebrations, a few more flags and police than usual. Algerians seem largely to ignore the national holiday, with many shops open for business and young couples strolling on the sea front. Nationalism is perhaps here, as elsewhere, only a ghost of contradictions, summoned as troubled cultural expression and conflicted by ethnic grievances. It is also a presiding spirit of resistance to the economic dispossession and police control of Algerians by an oil-rich elite at home, as well to the marginalisation of Algerian minorities in France. It was this spirit that imbued the carnivalesque repossession of public space by Algerians in the centres of Marseille and Paris during the 2010 World Cup.

Intensely Blue: Card Sent by John Perivolaris and Received in Manchester by Joseph McGonagle

Mancunian Mayhem: Postcard Sent by Brenda Burrell and Received in Manchester by Joseph McGonagle

French Stone, Collo: Postcard Sent by Djihed Afifi and Received in Manchester by Joseph McGonagle