Photographer: Verger, Pierre.
Title: Touareg du Hoggar (Tamanrasset).
Date: 1936.
Country: Algeria.
Medium: gelatin silver print.
Size: 29 x 24 cm.
Condition: very good.
Reference: PVI0919/1
Provenance: Italian collection.
Literature:  Pierre Verger, The Go-Between. Editors Jean Loup Pivin & Pascal Martin Saint Leon. Revue Noire 1993, ISBN 2 909571 041.
Extra: stamp 'Photo Pierre Verger' and titled on the verso.
Pierre Edouard Leopold Verger (1902-1996) was a French photographer, ethnologist, anthropologist and researcher who lived most of his life in the city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in Brazil.. At the age of 30, after losing his family, Pierre Verger took up the career of journalistic photographer. Over the next 15 years, he traveled four continents, documenting many civilizations that would soon be effaced by progress. His photographs were featured in magazines such as Paris-Soir, Daily Mirror , Life, and Paris Match, and in 1955 his graphic composition of three women bearing vases of flowers on turbaned heads was selected by curator Edward Steichen for MoMA's 1955 world-touring The Family of Man exhibition.
Verger developed a photographic work of great importance, based on everyday life and the popular culture. He also wrote several reference texts on the Afro-Bahian culture and the Diaspora, focusing his research work on the study of the religious aspects of Candomblé, an issue that becomes his main interest point. Veger's contributions to ethnography are embodied in dozens of conference papers, journal articles and books and were recognized by Sorbonne University, which conferred upon him a doctoral degree in 1966.