Abdo Shanan’s Algerian Photographs

All photographs by Abdo Shanan, from the series “Diary: Exile, Algiers and Oran, Algeria,” 2014–16. Courtesy the artist and Collective 220.

The photographs in Abdo Shanan’s series “Diary: Exile”(2014–2016) take viewers by the hand and race them through a vertiginous world of gritty, everyday intimacies. Imagine Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus meeting Roger Ballen in the inner cities of twenty-first-century Algeria to produce work that none of them had the background or experience to perceive. More often than not,