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.

Building by Fernand Pouillon, Seraidi

A respite from the noise, dirt, and restless frustration of Algerian reality below to the clear light, air, and silence of the mountain village of Seraidi. For my friend, Atef, the contrast is startling between the divine perfection of nature above, untouched by man or politics, and the man-made hells of colony and post-colony, below. Up here, a moment’s glimpse of heaven before one remembers that Seraidi was an epicentre of violent unrest in the 1990s

Wall, Annaba

Cigarette Stall, Cours de la Révolution, Annaba