The black-and-white image identifies Fez as the city where the photo was taken, while the ostensibly retouched photo mentions “Tanger.” The barefooted woman looks exotic to the foreign eye in her traditional attire. The two postcards above feature the same woman, but there are variations in the captions. The veil represents a form of resistance and a symbol of cultural identity that refuses to yield to colonial intrusion. The frustration felt by the colonial photographer in the presence of a veiled woman, Alloula posits, occurs when he realizes that the exoticism he thought he could easily capture resists his lens and desire to uncover the mystery. As Algerian writer Malek Alloula (1937-2015) argues in “The Colonial Harem:” “thrust in the presence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels photographed having himself become an object-to-be-seen, he loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze.” For the colonizer, the modesty of Moroccan women, whether inside their harem or veiled in public, seemed mysterious and possibly unsettling too. The postcards in this article focus on women, especially Moroccan and Maghrebi women, mostly because they are more available. The way they looked, the background, and the general atmosphere were all carefully chosen. When we look at an image, we should be aware that “the photographer is selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights,” as John Berger states in “Ways of Seeing.” The colonial photographer selected his subjects and their surroundings with great deliberation. Photographs convey the photographer’s perspective on their subjects. Likewise, French colonialism in Morocco utilized the art of photography to document scenes and portraits from Morocco to appropriate them. The Napoleonic scientific expedition to Egypt in 1798, for instance, comprised a sizable body of intellectuals who were to conduct the first large-scale study of Egypt. The Europeans were quite aware that knowledge was power, and that cultural penetration could be more powerful and lasting than military campaigns. They also brought along anthropologists, historians, artists, and photographers to study and document indigenous culture and history. When European powers swept through Africa and Asia in search of resources, new markets, and labor, they did not rely solely on military strength. Along with distorted textual representations in travelogues and literary accounts, pictorial misrepresentations of the natives played an important role in dehumanizing the indigenous people. The cards abounded with ethnic and cultural stereotypes to reinforce the colonial assumption of the West’s superiority. Colonial postcards were used to promote and legitimize colonialism through the portrayal of native people as primitive people needing to be civilized. The invention of postcards in 1860 coincided with the rise of Western imperialism and European powers’ scramble to establish new colonies in Africa and Asia.
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