Therese

Thérèse

In 1935 and 1936, the French ethnographer Thérèse Rivière lived and worked with the Ath Abderrahman nomadic tribe in the Aurès region of Algeria.

She took 3500 photographs and collected hundreds of objects, plant specimens, sounds, sketches, films and stories during this mission. She also returned to Paris with a collection of drawings, by adults and children, today known as the Album of North African Indigenous Drawings.

Her engaged and passionate practice was unique for a museum ethnographer.

Her work has, until recently, been largely forgotten, eclipsed in part by researchers like Germaine Tillion (also on the 1935 mission) and Thérèse's brother Georges Henri Rivière, founder of the Arts and Popular Tradition Museum.

Ten years after that first mission, Thérèse Rivière, now thought to have been bipolar, was forcibly interned in mental hospitals, where she remained for two decades, until her death.