From the New York Times about the photographing of Algerian women by the French

THE COLONIAL HAREM By Malek Alloula. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Introduction by Barbara Harlow. Illustrated. 135 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cloth, $29.50. Paper, $13.95.

IN the postcard, the beautiful Fatmah is wearing elaborately draped trousers with an embroidered and beaded vest. On her head is a jeweled turban, around her forehead are more beads, and her neck and ankles are weighted with chains and worked metals. She leans against a carpet, careful, in this pose and in others, to show the cigarette in her hand.

According to Malek Alloula, an Algerian poet who lives and writes in France, Fatmah is a phantasm, a French colonial projection of a world that never truly existed, an oriental mystery whose secret lies not so much in what her exotic costume hides as in the imperialistic desires that evoked her image.

For 30 years at the beginning of this century, the French photographed Fatmah and other Algerian women, displaying their images on postcards that were sent back to France with casual or incidental messages. The real message of the cards, according to Mr. Alloula, whose book contains 90 photographic reproductions, was neither casual nor incidental, but was instead a sign of conquest, of Western designs on the Orient, of violence. Wanting to possess the Algerian land, French colonists first claimed the bodies of its women, using sex as a surrogate for an extension of another larger usurpation of culture.

Beyond doubt, many of these images are tawdry, and Mr. Alloula has arranged them in an increasing order of degradation, ending his book with what he calls an ''anthology of breasts'': women, naked to the waist, peer out of the postcards accompanied by captions like ''Want to party, honey?'' or ''Oh! Is it ever hot!'' or ''The Cracked Jug.'' The ordinarily hidden is made brutally visible; the private is perverted and made public. The model, Mr. Alloula tells us, ''in selling the image of her body . . . sells at the same time . . . the image of the body of Algerian women as a whole.'' ''These raided bodies are the spoils of victory, the warrior's reward.'' They are a surrogate for political and military conquest. Mr. Alloula's motive in writing this book and in compiling these images is, in his own words, to return ''this immense postcard to its sender.'' It is a belated form of confrontation with the French, or as Barbara Harlow, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote the book's excellent introduction, suggests, a ''challenge and riposte.'' Through it Mr. Alloula reclaims a lost sense of honor; he recoups a former oppression - an oppression, he says unabashedly, that he takes personally: ''What I read on these cards does not leave me indifferent. It demonstrates to me . . . the desolate poverty of a gaze that I myself, as an Algerian, must have been the object of at some moment in my personal history.'' I AGREE with the art historian John Berger that one of the most valuable things we can do as critics is to restore photographs to their original contexts and thus recover the political and social memories associated with them. But the context revealed by Mr. Alloula's analysis is to me (another kind of spectator, neither French, Algerian nor male) as disturbing as the initial artifice that he unmasks.

For the deepest source of his anger seems not to derive from concern for the women who are the subjects of these photographs, but from ''the absence of . . . male society . . . its defeat, its irremediable rout.'' The challenge Mr. Alloula returns to the French, the cultural dialogue he initiates, remains male-centered and concerned with women as property and as symbolic marks of (dis)honor or status for the men in their families. If Algerian women were vulnerable and disgraced by their original display on colonial postcards, they are once again exposed by their display in this book. Their images leave them still silent and newly imprisoned by the very text that purports to liberate them. I cannot believe that the barred windows of the harem were solely the fictions of a colonial imagination