“At the very beginning of the Algerian War, France made life hard for North Africans. Police and Arabs faced off in the Paris neighborhood of the Goutte d’Or. In Nanterre, police stopped and searched every bicot (arab man) they saw. . The Arabs were calm, stunned, a little upset. That was the beginning.”
Pierre Boulat for LIFE Magazine, Paris 1955.

Pierre Boulat was born in 1924. He entered the Ecole Nationale de Photographie et de Cinema in 1940, and began taking pictures for the Vichy government in 1943 to avoid forced labor in Germany. In 1948, he moved to Cairo, where he published his first book, Images d’Egypte. Back in Paris, Boulat began working as a freelance photographer, eventually landing a job at the prestigious American magazine, Life, in 1957. He was the first Western journalist to travel to the USSR since the War, and in 1964 became the first Western journalist to visit post-revolutionary China. Boulat continued producing series on subjects like Palestine, drug trafficking in the Mediterranean Basin, and the Sahara Desert. He was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1993. Boulat died in 1998.

Today Pierre Boulat is represented by the COSMOS agency.

Read the full text of this article on the French version of Le Journal.