Houssem Boulifa by Osama Cornawy
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Art & Photography, Here/Now: Algeria
Here/Now: Houssem Boulifa builds an archive of belonging in Algeria
Text Hamdi Baala
Houssem Boulifa grew up in France. He was born in 1997 in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, to parents whose origins lie in El Oued and Touggourt, in southeastern Algeria. His passion for photography began with family archives. As a child, far from much of his extended family, he spent long hours leafing through photo albums and watching VHS tapes brought back from Algeria. “It was through these images,” he recalls, “that my parents showed us who we were and where we came from.” As a means of transmission that allows stories, faces and places to circulate across distance, photographs became, for Houssem a window into his roots.
From an early age, his parents took him on regular trips to visit family in Algeria. Like many French-Algerians, his life unfolded between the two shores of the Mediterranean, shaped by frequent movement between the two countries. Those geographical, cultural and emotional crossings continue to shape his photographic practice today. Houssem approaches photography as a way of maintaining connections between generations, places, lived experience and memory.
“I really appreciated the object that is a photo and its ability to tell the stories of people. It gave me the desire to tell my own stories,” he said.
He did not grow up in a particularly artistic environment. His family was firmly oriented toward academic success, with careers in medicine, engineering and other professions seen as the natural path forward. He himself followed this route, studying electrical engineering in Évry, near Paris. Photography developed alongside his technical education, driven by curiosity rather than formal training. It was only in 2022 that he decided to devote himself fully to photography, turning what had been an intimate practice into his primary vocation.
His early fascination with family photo albums led him to analogue photography. His first camera was an inheritance: a family camera his father had used years earlier. Houssem experimented with various formats and devices before settling on film, which he now works exclusively with.
The choice is partly rooted in the old family photographs that first drew him to the medium, but it also reflects the way he thinks about memory and time. Film, with its inherent slowness, imposes a rhythm that mirrors his relationship to both.
“It’s a process that takes a while. You could take three months before you finish a roll and develop it. And then you rediscover your photos, and that is when you know what it looks like,” he said.
The fact that Houssem’s images often resist easy dating, combined with his relationship to Algeria (a place he did not grow up in but is not a complete stranger to), gives the pictures he takes there a distinct sensibility. With an outlook that is neither internal nor entirely external, he approaches landscapes, public space and traditional gatherings with the attentiveness of someone familiar with them, yet continues to rediscover them. This is evident in photos of Fantasia and in traditional exhibitions of horsemanship, often featured at celebrations and wedding ceremonies. “They create a festive atmosphere, and these become moments of life that make us nostalgic when we see the pictures after a while,” he explained.
Football is another recurring presence in Houssem’s work. Passionate about the sport, he often photographs children and young adults playing in both France and Algeria, many of them wearing the national team’s jersey. In a country where football remains one of the most powerful expressions of collective identity, the images capture moments of belonging that resonate across generations and borders.
Beyond Algeria, travel contributes to his broader interest in building what he describes as an evolving archive. Taken in France, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, these images allow memory to accumulate and transform over time.
His series The Path to Peace was inspired by his personal faith and photographed during a pilgrimage to Mecca. The project traces moments of meditation and the intimacy of individual prayer within a crowd, shared by people from different generations and backgrounds.
Houssem held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2023, an experience he says consolidated years of work and reinforced his decision to pursue photography full-time. He has yet to exhibit in Algeria, something he hopes to do in the future. In the meantime, he takes pride in knowing that some of the people he photographs display his images in their homes and places of work.
Looking ahead, he hopes to publish a photobook that brings together the growing archive of images he has built across France, Algeria, and beyond.