The peasant and photography (Pierre Bourdieu)

ARTICLE

graphy
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 601–616[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050701]

The peasant and photography
■

Pierre and Marie-Claire Bourdieu
Collège de France
Translated and adapted by Loïc Wacquant and
Richard Nice

■ Drawing on an ethnography of the author’s childhood
village in southwestern France, this article analyses the social uses and
meaning of photographs and photographic practice in the peasant society
of Béarn in the early 1960s. Photography was first introduced on the
occasion of the great ceremonies of familial and collective life, such as
weddings, in which it fulfills the function of affirming the unity, standing,
and boundaries of the lineages involved. Such ceremonies can be
photographed because they lie outside the everyday routine and they
must be photographed to solemnize and materialize the image that the
group intends to present of itself. Thus photos are read and appreciated
not in themselves and for themselves, in terms of their technical or
aesthetic qualities, but as lay sociograms providing a visual record of
extant social roles and relations; and they are typically stored away in a
box as it would be indecent or ostentatious to display them in one’s home.
Peasants use photography strictly as consumers, and then only selectively.
The rarity of photographic practice among them is explained not by the
negative determinisms of income or technological familiarity but by the

fact that taking pictures is regarded as a frivolous luxury associated with
urban ways and an innovation suspect of manifesting the will to
distinguish oneself and to rise above one’s rank, which doubly violates the
ethos of the group. The mandatory photographic posture itself, with its
stress on conventionality, fixity, and frontality, is an extension of the
peasant ethic of honor that sharply limits the taking and using of photos
and stands in direct affinity with the style of social relations fostered by a

ABSTRACT


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hierarchical and closed society in which the lineage and the ‘house’ have
more reality than the particular individuals who compose them.

■ photography, peasantry, technology, kinship,
sentiment, honor, aesthetics, village culture, Béarn, France

KEY WORDS

What explains that photographs and, more specifically, photographic
practice occupy such a limited place among the peasantry?1 Does this stem
from ignorance, related to a lack of information about modern technologies, or from the will to ignore these, that is to say, a genuine cultural
choice that has to be understood by reference to the values specific to
peasant society? If the latter hypothesis holds, would not the history of a
technology that contradicts those values in what is most essential in them
bring to light what makes the core of the peasant ethic?

Owing to the duality of its structure, the village of Lesquire, in Béarn,2
offered a veritable experimental situation allowing one to study the
diffusion of a modern technology in a peasant milieu and to analyse the
relationships that may exist between citadinization, the induction into
urban ways, and the appearance and growth of the practice of photography. The opposition between the bourg (the market-village, with 264
inhabitants in 1954) and the surrounding hameaux (dispersed clusters of
farms totalling 1,090 dwellers) is very marked in ecological and morphological terms (the size of families in the hamlets is much larger) and it
dominates all aspects of village life. First, it organizes economic life, as the
bourg has gradually monopolized all the urban functions since 1918: it is
the place of residence of pensioners, civil servants, and members of the
professions (who together make up 44.2% of the heads of household), and
of craftsmen and shopkeepers (36.6%); agricultural laborers, workers, and
landholders make up only a tiny minority (11.5%) of its population,
whereas they account for nearly the totality of the population (88.8 %) of
the hamlets. Between the last houses of the bourg, where French is spoken,
and the first farms, barely a hundred yards distant, where the people
speak Béarnais, a language that the villagers regard as inferior and vulgar,
there runs a genuine border, that which separates the villagers with urban
pretensions from the peasants of the hamlets, attached or chained to their
traditions and therefore often deemed as backward (for a fuller analysis of
this opposition, see Bourdieu, 1962, 2002).


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Solemnizing relations: the photograph as sociogram

Photographic images entered peasant society very early, long before the
practice of taking photographs. They were introduced by the people of the
bourg as everything predisposed them to play the role of go-between
between the peasants of the outlying hamlets and the city. Their use rapidly
became mandatory, especially on the occasion of weddings, because they
came to fulfill functions that pre-existed their introduction. Indeed,
photography appears from the very outset as the required accompaniment
of the great ceremonies of familial and collective life. If one accepts, with
Durkheim (1995), that the function of festivals is to revivify the group,
one understands why photography should be associated with them, since
it provides the means of eternizing and solemnizing these climactic
moments of social life wherein the group reasserts its unity. In the case of
weddings, for example, the image that fixes for eternity the assembled
group or, better, the assembling of two groups, takes its place in a necessary way in a ritual whose function is to consecrate, that is, to sanction
and to sanctify, the union between two groups through the union between
two individuals. It is no doubt no accident that the order in which photography has been introduced into the ritual of ceremonies corresponds to the
social importance of each of them. The oldest and most traditional usage
of photography, explains J.-P.A. (born in Lesquire in 1885), is the wedding
photograph:3
The first time I attended a wedding ceremony where photographs were taken
in front of the church must have been in 1903. It was the wedding of a
countryman who had relatives in town, that kind of thing. The photographer made everyone take their places on the steps of the church, there, and
some were seated and others were standing behind them. He had set things
up, with benches, with covers so they wouldn’t get their clothes dirty. There
were no cars then yet, but he had come with a car. People talked about that
a lot. The groom was an ‘American’ [a local emigrant to America], L., from
the Ju. family, a great family, who married the heiress from the R. family. It
was a great wedding, what with him coming from America. He would go
around with a little mare, a gold chain on his waistcoat. That was the first
occasion I remember, perhaps there were others before, but that one really

made a splash! The very old folks had never seen that kind of thing before,
no. . . . Later, the photographers came forward of their own accord when
they knew a wedding was in the offing. . . . They were the ones presenting
themselves, the families didn’t have to ask them. Nowadays, people call them
in. But it really took off after the Great War, from 1919 onward. The habit
of going to Pau to get their picture taken dates back from this moment. . . .
It’s the photographer who would come on, who offered his services.

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Otherwise there are those who would not have called him in, maybe. But
once he’s there, they don’t dare say no. Nothing is too expensive on that day.

The wedding photograph imposed itself as obligatory so rapidly only
because it encountered its social conditions of existence: expenditure and
extravagance are part of festive behaviors, in particular the ostentatious
outlays that no one can avoid making without derogating honor.
These pictures, in the early days, the photographer would go round to see
who wanted some. He would collect the names and he sent them afterwards.
You had to pay in advance. Oh, it really wasn’t that expensive. It was two
francs per person. And nobody dared refuse. And then they were glad to
have it in their home after the wedding. The gentleman bought the picture
for the lady, it was the thing to do, on a day like that. (J.-P.A.)
The group photo was compulsory, anyone who didn’t buy it would pass for
miserly (picheprim). That would be an insult to the folks who had invited

you. It would show a lack of regard. At the table, you’re in everyone’s sight,
you can’t say no. (J.B.)

Buying the photograph is a tribute paid to those who made the invitation. The photograph is the object of rule-governed exchanges; it enters into
the circuit of mandatory gifts and counter-gifts to which weddings and some
other ceremonies give rise. Being an officiant whose presence sanctions the
solemnity of the rite, the official photographer may be shadowed or
seconded by the amateur photographer, but he can never be replaced by
him.4
It is only around 1930 that photographs of first communions began to
appear while photographs of christenings are even more recent and rare.
For the past several years, some peasants have taken advantage of the
photographers’ presence at the agricultural shows to have their picture
taken with their livestock, but these are a rarity. For christenings, which
never give rise to big ceremonies and only involve close family members,
photography remains exceptional, but the first communion gives many
mothers an opportunity to have a picture taken of their children:5 one
cannot but approve of a mother who acts in this manner, and ever more so
as the importance of children in society increases. In the old peasant society,
a child was never the center of attention, as is the case today. The major
festivals and ceremonies of village life were essentially adult events and it is
only since 1945 that children’s celebrations (Christmas or First
Communion, for example) have become important. As this society devotes
more attention to children and, by the same token, to women as mothers,
so the habit of having the children photographed is reinforced. In the photo
collection of a smallholder of the hamlets (B.M.), portraits of children make
up half of the post-1945 pictures whereas there are hardly any (three, to be


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precise) in the collection for the years prior to 1939. In those days, one
photographed mostly adults, secondarily family groupings combining
parents and children, and only exceptionally children on their own. Now
the opposite is the case. But the photographing of children is itself to a large
extent accepted because it has a social function. The division of labor
between the sexes gives the woman the task of maintaining relations with
members of the group who live at a distance, starting with her own family.
Like letters and better than letters, photographs have a part to play in the
perpetual updating of mutual acquaintance.6 It is customary to take
children (at least once and, if possible, periodically) to visit kin who live
outside the village, and in the first instance the wife’s mother when the wife
comes from outside. It is the woman who initiates these journeys and who
sometimes undertakes them without her husband. Sending a photograph
has the same function: through the picture, one presents the new offspring
to the whole group that must ‘recognize’ him or her.
In this regard, it is understandable that photographs should be the object
of a reading that one may call sociological and that they are never
considered in themselves and for themselves, in terms of their technical or
aesthetic qualities. The photographer is assumed to know his craft and one
has no basis on which to make comparisons. The photograph must simply
provide a representation sufficiently faithful and precise to allow recognition. It is methodically inspected and observed at length, in accordance
with the logic that governs the knowledge of others in everyday life: through
the confrontation of knowledges and experiences, one situates each person
by reference to his lineage and, often, the reading of old photographs takes
the form of a lecture in genealogical science, when the mother, the specialist

in the subject, teaches the child the relationships that link him or her to each
of the persons pictured. But, above all, one inquires to know who attended
the ceremony and how the couples were made up; each family’s field of
social relations is analysed; one notes absences, as indicators of quarrels,
and the presences that confer honor. For each guest, the photograph is a
kind of trophy, a sign and source of social significance (‘You are proud to
show that you were at the wedding,’ says J.L.). For the families of the
newlywed and for the couple themselves, it testifies to the rank of the family
by recalling the number and quality of the guests: the guests of B.M., son
of a ‘small house’ in the hamlets, are mainly relatives and neighbors, the
selection principle being traditional, whereas in the wedding photo of J.B.,
a well-off inhabitant of the bourg, one sees the work and school ‘mates’ of
the groom and even of the bride. In short, the wedding photo is a veritable
sociogram and it is read as such.
The photographing of major ceremonies is possible because – and only
because – such pictures capture behaviors that are socially approved and
socially regulated, that is to say already solemnized. Nothing may be

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photographed besides what must be photographed.7 The ceremony can be
photographed because it stands outside the everyday routine and must
be photographed because it materializes the image that the group intends
to present of itself as a group. What is photographed and apprehended by
the reader of the photograph are not, properly speaking, individuals in their

singular particularity but social roles – the husband, the boy at his first
communion, the soldier – or social relationships – the uncle from America
or the aunt in Sauvagnon. For example, B.M.’s collection includes a photo
that perfectly illustrates the first type: it pictures his father’s brother-in-law
dressed as a town postman, with his peaked cap on his head, a white shirt
with stand-up collar, a white-checkered necktie, a deep-cut frockcoat
without lapels, on his chest his badge bearing the number 471, and a high
waistcoat adorned with gilt buttons and a watch-chain, standing upright,
with his right hand resting on an oriental-style stand. What the emigrant
daughter sent her family was not the picture of her husband but the symbol
of his social success.8 The second type is illustrated by a photograph on the
occasion of a sojourn in Lesquire by B.M.’s brother-in-law: it solemnizes
the meeting of the two families by uniting uncles and nieces, aunts and
nephews. As if the intention were to manifest that the real object of the
photograph is not the individuals but the relationships between them, the
parents of one family hold in their arms the children of the other.9
In most peasant houses, photographs are kept ‘tight’, stored away in a
box, except for the wedding picture and certain portraits. It would be
indecent or ostentatious to display pictures of members of the family to
anyone who would happen by. Ceremonial photos are too solemn or too
private to be exhibited in the everyday living space;10 the only proper place
for them is either the display space, the sitting room, or, for the most
personal of them, such as the photographs of deceased parents, the
bedroom, alongside the pious images, the crucifix, and the blessed palm.
Amateur photos are kept in drawers. By contrast, in the petty-bourgeois
homes of the village, they acquire a decorative or affective value: enlarged
and framed, they adorn the walls of the living room, along with the travel
souvenirs. They even invade the altar of family values, the mantelpiece, and
take the place of the medals, prizes, and primary school certificates that used
to be displayed there in the old days but which the young village wife has

discreetly relegated, as rather ridiculous, to the darkest corner, behind the
door, so as not to shock the ‘old folks’.

A suspect innovation: photographic practice and the peasant ethos
Whereas photographic images, and especially wedding photos, were
adopted from the outset, without any resistance, by the whole community


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as a mandatory moment in the social ritual, photographic practice was
initially restricted to some isolated amateurs, all belonging to the village
bourgeoisie.
In my day, only the squire took photos and a few emplegats [‘employees’,
i.e., white-collar workers and professionals]: the tax collector, the tax inspector, the school teachers, and Doctor Co. (J.-P.A.)

Even today, whereas among the peasants of the hamlets there is currently
only one man, still young and unmarried, who takes photographs, in the
bourg there is a small number of more or less active amateurs. If it is
strongly dependent on income, the practice of photography is manifestly
linked to place of residence through the mediation of the degree to which
one adheres or aspires to urban values. In fact, nothing would be more
mistaken than to claim to explain the rarity of photographic practice in
peasant society by simple negative determinisms. Neither economic barriers,
such as the high cost of the equipment, nor technological barriers, nor even
the low level of information can account for this phenomenon. Peasants use,

and can use, photography strictly as consumers, and then only selectively,
because the system of values of which they partake, whose hub is a certain
image of the accomplished peasant, forbids them to become producers.
If photography is regarded as a luxury, this is first because the peasant
ethos requires that expenditure devoted to enlargement of the heritage or
the modernization of farm equipment take precedence over expenditures on
consumption. More generally, any outlay not sanctioned by tradition is
considered wasteful. But this is not all: innovation is always suspect in the
eyes of the group, and not only in itself, that is, as a denial of tradition.
People are always inclined to see in it an expression of the will to distinguish oneself, to stand out, to dazzle or to put down others. And that is an
affront to the principle that dominates the whole of social existence and has
nothing to do with egalitarianism. In fact, irony, mockery, and gossip have
the function of bringing back into line, that is, into conformity and uniformity, someone who, by his innovative behavior, seems to want to teach
a lesson or throw out a challenge to the whole community. Whether this be
his intention or not, there is no escaping suspicion. By invoking past
experience and calling on all the others to witness, one aims to deny
that the innovation corresponds to a real need. Thence it can only be
ostentatious.
But collective disapproval is graduated according to the nature of the
innovation and the area in which it is introduced. When it concerns agricultural techniques and crop tending, it does not elicit total and brutal
condemnation because, in spite of everything, the innovator is given the
benefit of the doubt: appearances notwithstanding, his behavior may be
inspired by the most praiseworthy motives, namely, the will to increase the

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value of his heritage. In such cases, he betrays the peasant tradition but he
remains a peasant. Moreover, moral condemnation can take the guise of the
skepticism of the technician and of the man of experience: the sanction of
the enterprise will be found in its own results. In any case, because he runs
the risk of failure or ridicule, the innovator commands respect.
By contrast, the community experiences innovation that it suspects to be
shorn of any rational or reasonable justification as a challenge and a
disavowal. This is because, in the manner of a gift that excludes a countergift, ostentatious behavior, or behavior perceived as such, puts the group in
a position of inferiority and can only be experienced as an affront, with
everyone feeling assaulted in his or her self-esteem. In that case, reproof and
repression are immediate and merciless. ‘What is he playing at? Who does
he take himself for?’ As a sign of status, photographic practice can only be
seen as expressing an effort to rise above one’s rank. This will to distinguish
oneself is then countered by a reminder of the common origins: ‘We know
where he came from.’ ‘His father wore clogs!’11
A frivolous luxury, the practice of photography would for a peasant be
a ridiculous barbarism; to indulge in such a fantasy would be rather like a
man taking a stroll along with his wife, on a summer evening, as the
pensioners of the bourg do:
That’s fine for vacationers, those are things of the city. A peasant who would
walk around with a camera hanging over his shoulder would be no more
than a failed monsieur (u moussu manquât). You need delicate hands to
handle those things. And what about the money? It’s expensive. All that
paraphernalia costs a bundle! (F.M.)

Associated with urban life, the practice of photography is apprehended
as a manifestation of the wish to play the urbanite, to act the part of the
gentleman (moussureya). And so it is seen as a betrayal of the group by a
parvenu. ‘S’en-monsieurer’ (literally, to ‘en-mister’ oneself, en-moussuri’s in

Béarnais) is a twofold offence against the fundamental imperatives of the
peasant ethic. It means in effect standing out by disowning oneself as a
member of the group and as a peasant.12 One admits of the true urbanite,
who is a complete outsider to the group, that he takes photographs because
that is part of the stereotyped image the peasant has of him. The camera is
one of the distinctive attributes of the ‘vacationer’ (lou bacanciè). Peasants
will indulge the latter’s fantasies, with a touch of irony, by taking up the
expected pose, in front of the yoke of oxen, thinking: ‘These people have
time to waste and money to squander.’ There is much less tolerance toward
natives of the village who return from the town, and still less toward inhabitants of the bourg who are suspected of taking up photography to give
themselves the air of city-dwellers. In other words, what is refused is not
photography in itself; as the whim and frivolity of an urbanite, it suits


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Taking up the expected pose for the visiting tourist.

‘outsiders’ perfectly – but them alone. In this domain, the innovatory
behavior of the city-dweller cannot elicit imitation because the tolerance it
enjoys is but an expression of the will to ignore it or a refusal to identify
with it.13
However, just as it varies according to the nature of the innovation,
the reproof also varies according to the social position and status of the
innovator. The logic of selection that governs borrowings and, by the same
token, the values that dominate this selection, can be apprehended not

only in the defences that the peasant ethos raises against everything that
threatens it, but also and especially in the exceptions that it concedes. If
photography can be allowed for women or, better, for mothers, as it then
serves socially approved purposes, and if, as a frivolous activity, it is

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tolerated in adolescence, the frivolous time of life, these are transactions
and compromises with the rule that spring from the very values of which
the rule partakes. Thus teenagers have always held a statutory right to a
licit – that is to say symbolic and oneiric – frivolity; so the same is true for
photography as for dancing and more generally for all the techniques of
courtship and festivity: ‘They make photos when they get enamoured with
one another (cuan s’amourouseyen), in the days of dancing.’
Out in the country, soon as a couple is married, there are other things to
think about. Be., the richest peasant, he took some photos at his engagement
ceremony and in the early days of his marriage. Now they live on a shoestring (ils tirent la guignorre), even more than smallholders like us. Little
whims like that are soon dropped when cares of the household come, and
so is the wish to dance. All that’s quite natural, in my view. And then, for
photographs, the professionals are there when you need them, for the big
occasions at least. (R.M., from Debat, a village in the Gave valley, 10 kilometers from Lacq)

These practices, acceptable for young people, are in any case abandoned
from the moment of marriage, which marks a sharp break in the course of
existence: from one day to another, it is over with village balls or outings,

and thus with the photography sometimes associated with them. ‘I stopped
after my honeymoon,’ says J.B. ‘. . . Now I have plenty of other things to
worry about.’ And his wife chipped in: ‘Oh, too right, he’s got other things
to worry about now.’ This man, who once took much pride in recounting
his holidays in Biarritz or his visits to Paris, who says that he does not have
the leisure to take photos although he spends a lot of time hunting wood
pigeons, now talks insistently only about his work, the only activity worthy
of a responsible adult man.

Photographic posture and the sentiment of honor
Even the posture that the peasant adopts in front of the camera seems to
express peasant values and more precisely the system of models that govern
relations with others in peasant society. Individuals generally present themselves face-on, in the center of the picture, standing and full-length, that is
to say at a respectful distance. In group photos they stand close together,
often with their arms over each other. Their gazes converge on the lens so
that the whole image points to its absent center. When a couple is portrayed,
they hold each other by the waist in an entirely conventional pose. The
norms of conduct in front of the lens sometimes rise to consciousness, in
positive or negative form: a member of a group assembled for a solemn
occasion such as a wedding who adopts a casual posture or fails to look


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straight at the camera and to take up the pose is the object of disapproval.
He is, as the phrase goes, ‘not really there’.

To take part in a photograph is to grant the testimony of one’s presence,
which is the mandatory counterpart of the tribute received in being invited;
it testifies that one values the honor of having been invited to take part and
that one takes part in order to give honor.14 How would the arrangement
and posture of the participants not be marks of solemnity? No one would
think of infringing upon the photographer’s instructions, of talking to his
neighbor, of looking elsewhere. That would be a breach of propriety and
especially an affront to the whole group and, first and foremost, to those
who are chiefly ‘honored on that day,’ the bridal couple. The proper and
dignified stance consists in standing up straight and looking straight ahead
with the gravity that befits this solemn occasion.
It is not unreasonable to think that the spontaneous search for frontality is linked to the most deeply embedded cultural values.15 In this society
that exalts the sentiment of honor, dignity, and responsibility, this closed
world in which one feels at every moment and without escape the unremitting gaze of others, it is important to present the most honorable image of
oneself to others: the fixed, rigid posture, of which the soldier’s ‘standing
to attention’ is the limiting case, seems to be the expression of this unconscious intention. The axial image, conforming to the principle of frontality,
offers an impression that is as clearly readable as can be, as if one worried
to avoid any misunderstanding or confusion. The same intention manifests
itself in the embarrassment felt by the photographed subject, the concern
to rectify one’s posture and to wear one’s best clothes, and the instinctive
refusal to be caught in everyday dress, doing everyday things. To take the
proper pose is to respect oneself and to ask for respect. The subject offers
the viewer an act of reverence, of courtesy, that is governed by convention
and requests the viewer to obey the same conventions and the same norms.
He ‘faces up’ (fait front) and asks to be looked at frontally and from a
distance, this demand for reciprocal deference constituting the essence of
frontality. The photographic portrait thus performs the objectivation of the
self-image. As such, it is simply the limiting case of the relationship with
others.16
Everything takes place as if, by obeying the principle of frontality and

adopting the most conventional posture, one sought to take charge, insofar
as is possible, of the objectification of one’s own image. To look at the other
without being seen, without being seen looking and without being looked
at, to ‘steal a glance’ as the phrase goes, and, moreover, to photograph them
in that way, is to steal the other’s image. By looking at the person who looks
at me (or photographs me), by arranging my posture, I offer myself to be
looked at as I want to be seen; I give the image of myself that I intend to
give and, quite simply, I give my image. In brief, faced with a gaze that fixes

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and immobilizes appearances, to adopt the most dignified, the most sober
and the most ceremonial attitude, to stand stiffly upright, feet joined
together, arms flat by the sides, in the manner of a soldier standing to attention, is to reduce the risk of awkwardness and clumsiness and to present to
the other a regulated, prepared, primed image: to give a regulated image of
oneself is a way of imposing the rules of one’s own perception.
The conventionality of the posture and dress adopted for photographs
would seem to derive from the style of social relations fostered by a society
at once hierarchical and static, in which the lineage and the ‘house’ have
more reality than the particular individuals who compose them, defined as
they are essentially by the groups they belong to,17 where the social rules
of conduct and the moral code are more manifest than the feelings, the wills,
or the thoughts of singular subjects, where social exchanges, strictly regulated by consecrated conventions, are enacted in dread of the judgment of
others, under the gaze of a collective opinion quick to condemn in the name
of norms indisputable and undisputed, and are always dominated by the

concern to present the best possible image of oneself, the one best conforming to the ideal of dignity and honor.18
Solemnization, hieraticism and eternalization are inseparable. In the
language of all aesthetics, frontality expresses the eternal, by opposition to
depth, through which temporality is reintroduced. In painting, the plane
expresses being or essence, in a word, the timeless (see Bonnefoy, 1959). If
an action is depicted within it, it is always an essential movement,
‘immobile’ and outside of time; it is – the words themselves say it well – the
equilibrium or poise of an eternal gesture, like the ethical or social norm
that it embodies: spouses standing with their arms around each other
express in another gesture the same meaning as the joined hands in the
portrait bust of Cato and Portia in the Vatican.
Popular photography eliminates the accidental or the aspect, which, as
a fleeting image, dissolves the real by temporalizing it. The ‘snapshot’, the
picture ‘taken from life’ – which is the expression of a worldview born in
the Quattrocento with perspective – cuts out an instantaneous slice into the
visible world and, petrifying human action, immobilizes a unique state of
the reciprocal relationship between things, and arrests the gaze on an imperceptible moment in a never-completed trajectory. By contrast, the posed
photograph, which only grasps and fixes figures who are settled, motionless, in the immutability of the plane, loses its power of corrosion.19 Thus,
when they spontaneously adopt the arrangements and postures of the
figures of Byzantine mosaics, the peasants of Béarn who pose for a wedding
photo seem to want to escape the power that photography has to de-realize
the world by temporalizing it.


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Acknowledgements
This article is the translation of Pierre and Marie-Claire Bourdieu, ‘Le paysan
et la photographie’, Revue française de sociologie, vol. 6, no. 2, April–June
1965, pp. 164–74. It is published here in English for the first time by kind
permission of Jérôme and Marie-Claire Bourdieu and the journal. The section
titles are by the translators.

Notes
1 This article presents, in a provisional form, documents and data that were
also used in part in a book published simultaneously, Photography: A
Middle-Brow Art (Bourdieu et al., 1965).
2 Lesquire is the pseudonym of the isolated village in this mountainous region
of southwest France near the Spanish border where Pierre Bourdieu spent
his childhood years. It is the site where he carried out fieldwork on gender
and kinship relations among the peasantry in 1959–61 and subsequent
years, in parallel to similar work among the Kabyles of Algeria [translator].
3 J.-P.A., 85, a widower with a primary school education, lived in the bourg
at the time of the study, but he had spent all of his youth in a hameau.
Interviews with him alternated between French and Béarnais.
4 The photograph marks the transition from religious ritual to secular ritual,
the wedding party; it is taken on the doorstep of the church.
5 As at wedding parties, here too the photograph takes its place in the circuit
of ritually imposed exchanges. It is added to the ‘memory image’ that the
child brings to relatives and neighbors in exchange for a gift.
6 The sending of photographs that follows a wedding generally triggers a
resurgence of correspondence: ‘The “exiles” ask that the couples featured
on the photo be identified, especially the youth of whom they’ve only
known the parents’ (A.B.).
7 ‘No, the photographer never takes pictures of the ball. That has got no
value in people’s eyes. I’ve never seen any’ (J.L.).

8 Similarly, among the photographs displayed in the villagers’ homes, one
often sees the annual photo of the rugby team, lined up in a formal pose,
and only very rarely shots of them in action, which are relegated to the
‘photo box’.
9 Most of the more recent photos in B.M.’s collection were taken by
amateurs. Some of the pictures of B.M.’s wife and daughter were shot
during visits to his wife’s brother’s wife (who lives in Oloron, a small town
about 80 kilometers away), on the occasion of the market or the fair: the
children are lined up at the front and the adults stand behind them. As for
the other amateur photos, like the one just described they were taken

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10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

during the visit by the brother-in-law from Paris. Four of them stand apart,
at first sight: those that show B.M., in front of his oxen, his goad on his
shoulder, and his nephew in the same posture. Are they actual snapshots
of everyday life? In reality, they are posed and allegorical: on the one hand,
the little Parisian, playing at being a peasant; on the other, not B.M. as a
singular person but the postcard-picture of Béarn featuring a peasant
leading his oxen, his body upright, his beret aslant over his ear, his agulhade
on his shoulder.
The major common room, the kitchen, receives only an impersonal decoration, everywhere the same: the charity calendar from the postman or the
fire brigade and colour prints bought in Pau (the closest city, a dozen miles
away) or souvenirs of a pilgrimage visit to Lourdes.
‘He wants to take photos! He’s becoming a real mister (s’en-monsieure),
isn’t he! Soon he’ll be taking pictures of the pigs and the pigsty.’ ‘He’d do
better to change his plough and that wretched pair of cows he’s got to
plough with!’ ‘A gadget like that, and with that lousy suit!’
This explains the ambiguous attitude of the peasant towards the civil
servant employed in the bourg. On the one hand, as the representative of
the central administration and trustee of governmental authority, he is
imbued with respect and consideration. But, on the other hand, the man of
the bourg is truly the bourgeois, the man who has deserted the land and
broken or disowned the bonds that tied him to his original milieu.
Most of the peasants who were questioned on this mentioned relatives who
have taken up photography since they left the village. But a peasant who
sees the sister or cousin, son or brother, who left to work in a factory,
coming back with a camera, is justified to associate photography with the
shift to urban ways. That being so, far from enticing him to imitation, such

examples, even when they concern close relatives, only confirm his conviction that photography is ‘not for us’.
‘If you attended somebody’s wedding and you didn’t go for the photo,
people noticed that. You weren’t in the group, they said that M. wasn’t in
the photo. They reckoned you slipped away, and it was taken badly’ (J.L.,
to her husband, in the course of an interview).
Among the Kabyles, the man of honor is a man who ‘faces up’, who holds
his head high and looks others in the face, with his own face uncovered
(Bourdieu, 1965).
Photography is the situation in which the awareness of one’s body-forothers reaches its highest acuity. One feels subjected to a gaze and to a gaze
that fixes and immobilizes appearances. [Trans.: On the social bases of
bodily embarrassment among the peasants and its structural consequences,
see Bourdieu, 1962, excerpted in this issue as ‘The Peasant and his Body’.]
It is not uncommon for a younger son who marries an eldest daughter
and comes to live with her parents to lose his surname and thus to be


Bourdieu

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The peasant and photography

designated only by the name of his new house. [Trans.: Kinship relations
and the reproduction of lineage hierarchy in Béarn are discussed at length
in Bourdieu (1990[1980]: 147–61).]
18 Wilhelm Hausenstein (1913: 759–60) brings to light the connection
between the frontal view and the social structure of ‘feudal and hieratic
societies’.
19 Once again, an exception is made for the children, perhaps because change
is their very nature: where the aim is to capture the ephemeral and the accidental, photography is suitable since it cannot snatch the fleeting aspect

from irrecoverable disappearance without constituting it as such.

References
Bonnefoy, Yves (1959) ‘Le temps et l’intemporel dans la peinture du Quattrocento’, in L’Improbable et autres essais. Paris: Mercure de France. (Trans.
‘Time and the Timeless in Quattrocento Painting’, in N. Bryson (ed.)
Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, pp. 8–26. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1962) ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Études rurales 5–6
(April): 32–136 (excerpted in this issue as ‘The Peasant and his Body’).
Bourdieu, Pierre (1965) ‘The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society’, in J.G.
Peristiany (ed.) Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society,
pp. 191–241. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Bourdieu, Pierre et al. (1965) Un Art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de
la photographie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. (Trans. Photography: A MiddleBrow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1989.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1990[1980]) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press;
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2002) Le Bal des célibataires. La crise de la société paysanne
en Béarn. Paris: Points/Seuil. (Trans. The Ball of the Bachelors. Cambridge:
Polity Press; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.)
Durkheim, Emile (1995[1912]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (trans.
and with an intro. by Karen E. Fields). New York: Free Press.
Hausenstein, Wilhelm (1913) Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
36 (February).
■
PIERRE BOURDIEU held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège
de France, where he directed the Center for European Sociology
and the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales until his
passing in 2002. He is the author of numerous classics of sociology
and anthropology, including Reproduction in Education, Society,

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and Culture (1970, tr. 1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972,
tr. 1977), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(1979, tr. 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, tr. 1988), and The Rules
of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field (1992, tr. 1996).
Among his ethnographic works are Le Déracinement. La crise de
l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (with Adbelmalek Sayad,
1964), Algeria 1960 (1977, tr. 1979), The Weight of the World
(1993, tr. 1998), and Le Bal des célibataires (2002). ■
■

MARIE-CLAIRE BOURDIEU is an art historian.

■

The picture in this article © Pierre Bourdieu/Fondation Pierre Bourdieu,
Geneva. Courtesy: Camera Austria, Graz.