Abdeslam Khelil (1942 –

Abdeslam Khelil, title unknown

In 1976 I taught for a year at the lycée de Ghardaïa, six hundred kilometres south of Algiers, in the Sahara desert. The M’Zab, of which Ghardaïa is the capital, is a group of five towns and their attendant oases, settled by the Mozabite sect, variously described as coming out of Persia or as Berber. I was the only native English speaker on the oasis – apart from some Scottish oil technicians who pitched up in the hotel the odd weekend. I lived in a new white house with a roof terrace, no furniture and a leatherette box of the latest punk records covered in a fine veil of sand. I played Patti Smith’s Horses that year, loud across the desert.

Abdeslam Khelil, l'enfant et l'infini

On one of my escapes north to Algiers during the school holidays I must have stumbled into the photo studio of Abdeslam Khelil at No. 2 rue Didouche Mourad. It was a ramshackle shop on a wide, elegant avenue in la ville française. I was twenty-one years of age, had read my Camus and André Gide, and was flush with Boumedienne’s dinars, useless outside the borders of the socialist republic.

Abdeslam Khelil, Fata

Born in 1942 on the oasis of Ouargla, Khelil still lives in Algiers, though he has long abandoned his camera. A search of the web reveals very little about this Algerian photographer. Many of his portraits were taken half a century ago in those desert towns that I came to like so well. Looking at these dog-eared pictures again recently, I recalled the smell of the carpet shops and of the goat-hair gandura I used to wear to school on those cold winter mornings. I remember the old slave quarters of Ben Isguen, Melika haute, the queen of the pentapolis, the women out among the graves and the dust storms blowing in from the south.

Abdeslam Khelil, title unknown

The lycée was near the camel mart, the landscape dusty, the girls in my classes fully covered except for a triangle around one eye. When they entered they removed their head covering and sat at the front. As the school year advanced there were fewer and fewer of them in seconde and première. They were married off.

It is a pity Abdeslam Khelil’s photographs of the Algerian desert are not better known. All that pre-mall world must have disappeared now, it brings on the long backward glance. The photos are stamped by the photographer, some of them with pencilled titles. The day I bought them in Algiers I must have wandered down to the port where there were wonderful old-style French restaurants with a colonial touch to the service. I would have caught the night bus to Laghouat and slept fitfully. The coffee at the bus station was thick and hot, the flatbread swollen with steam. I might have gone to find the little hotel in El Oued where Oscar Wilde holed up with Bosie, where Gide walked out into the dunes and got lost.

Abdeslam Khelil, title unknown