Algiers - APS
A journey through time across Algeria in the early years of independence captured by Italian reporter Pablo Volta, died in 2011, is offered to the public in Algiers during an exhibition of unpublished photographs inaugurated Saturday.
Organized by the Italian Cultural Institute, this exhibition which encompasses fifty scanned photos, will last until December 20 at the Center for Arts and Culture at Palace of the Rais (bastion 23).
Collected by themes, Pablo Volta's photos first recreate the atmosphere of the first autumn of independence through shots of the women's section of the FLN and Algerian workers on farms or in the port of Algiers.
A dozen pictures are devoted to the military parade having marked the first anniversary of the Algerian Constituent Assembly and portraits of foreign delegations, guests of Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella, its first president.
The reporter also restored the work of a "militant caravan that travelled in 1963 remote villages to discuss with the people, to know the needs of these regions, to meet nomadic populations, unite efforts to build the country or launch literacy campaign."
Another campaign photographed by Volta was the Algerian, French, Bulgarian and Yugoslav doctors training carers in areas isolated to fight against diseases that were rampant there.
At the same time the objective of Pablo Volta focused on the Algerian popular culture, mobilized in the service of the ideals of the revolution, in his photos depicting a parade of Tassili Tuareg with their costumes of S'beiba or the first shows of popular theater held in Ain Taya (suburb of Algiers).
Born in 1926 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pablo Volta had founded the first Italian photographic cooperative "I fotografi associati" in 1953, before volunteering for the creation of an audiovisual training center in Algeria, where he began in 1963 a work of documentation on the beginning of Algeria's rebuilding.