If one thing defines the work of Karim Kal, it's the rich and varied blackness that has seeped into most of his photographs from the past ten years. That blackness carries, all at once, Kal's formal, conceptual, and critical intentions. It is literally the blackness of a landscape at night, but it also resembles pools of ink or the deep stare of some Nietzschean abyss. It is an element of abstraction, an aesthetic tool connecting Kal to a lineage of visual thinkers from Kazimir Malevich to Kerry James Marshall. Blackness overwhelms whole portions of a given photograph while allowing streams of artificial light to reveal, for example, a mountain ridge, roadside signage, graffiti, plants, the edge of a terrace, or a dubious fluid leaked onto a darkened asphalt. In one image, the buildings of an alpine village glimmer like a trove of iridescent jewels. The blackness of Kal's photographs signals a mystery, something unknowable as well as unyielding. From the photographer's side, it is an embrace, a cloak thrown over a subject for its own protection. More important, to plunge half a picture into complete obscurity is a choice, an expression of autonomy.

Given his painterly approach to photography, it's no surprise to learn that Kal is inspired by geometric abstraction and the meditative style of Mark Rothko. When I recently spoke to him, Kal told me that intrigued by in "the space between people looking at art and the art itself." He added, "I'm very interested in this free space. I want to bring this freedom into the relationship" between viewers and artworks. How? By photographing urban and rural landscapes at night with a huge external flash and extremely fast shutter speeds. Kal chooses very deliberately what to illuminate. In doing so, he has developed a compelling mode of documentary photography whose purpose is less to expose than to select.

Kal was born in Geneva in 1977. He grew up in Douvaine, a French village not far from the southern shores of Lake Geneva. He took pictures on holidays or while messing around with his friends, using cheap disposables until he received his first real camera, a Pentax SLR, as a gift from his father. Very quickly, he knew he'd become a photographer. Just as intuitively, he pursued art as a general, wide-ranging field of study. Kal went to art schools in Avignon and Grenoble. He lived for a time in Paris and Lyon. In the Swiss town of Vevey, known for its Biennale Images festival, he completed a degree in photography and began to pictures. Much of his output since the early 2000s, while marked by an extreme sense of stillness, involves two key movements—back and forth between cities and mountains, and between Algeria and France. Before blackness, there was mesmeric bluenesse, the color of sea and sky as the Mediterranean spills into the Bay of Algiers. Kal's Images d'Alger, from 2002, is a series of four photographs that are printed together as a poster; installed stacked on a palette, the posters were given away at the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris. What could have been a clear-cut exercise in nostalgia is actually a critical reflection on the challenges faced by the residents of Bab El Oued, a popular neighborhood in Algiers, the Algerian capital, that was battered by the country's long and undeclared civil war of the 1990s and the further damaged by massive flooding in 2001. That project established a constellation of ideas that has guided Kal's photography ever since, including questions about colonial history, state violence, and the fate of people caught between institutional mistreatment and neglect. Major bodies of Kal's oeuvre are set in jails and hospitals, among the unsheltered, and along the far edges of peripheral suburbs.

In 2019, Kal began an ambitious project delving into the mythologies of the Upper Kabylia, an Indigenous (Amazigh) region, located above the city of Tizi Ouzou, on the Djurdjura mountain range, which is known for its resistance to foreign invasion, most notably by the French, who first attacked and occupied Algeria in 1830, but also the Algerian regime itself—which, after winning independence from France in 1962, has repeatedly cracked down on protest movements (over language politics and cultural identities) in the area. Kal titled the project Mons Ferratus, or iron mountains, after the name given to the territory by the Romans some two thousand years ago. In 2023, the proposal won Kal an Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, followed by an exhibition (and accompanying publication) at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris last spring.

In five parts-titled "Peaks," "Earth," "Rubble," "Mastic Trees." and "Sutures"—Mons Ferratus runs through the geological and architectural layers that make Upper Kabylia so fascinating and yet so frustrating. Hints of political conflict (a poster of a young Amazigh man killed in 2001 during the Black Spring) mingle with emblems of economic hardship, crude surveillance, and logistical improvisation. A series of photographs showing tree branches charred by wildfire cracks open an incredible story, as told through a wall text, about an arsonist, a lynching, and the retributive force of the state. A riveting study, in extreme close-up, of glass-plate negatives in the Musée du quai Branly unravels another story about Kabyle skulls that were collected in the nineteenth century as specimens (or trophies) of the French colonial campaign. Everywhere in Kal's images there are sudden irruptions: a road opens, a space frees up, an idea jumps from the theoretical armature of the project.

Kal is the son of an Algerian father and a French mother. His paternal grand-father came from one of the same mountain villages in Upper Kabylia that features in Mons Ferratus. But just as crucial to Kal's project is the fact that Mouloud Feraoun, a towering figure in Kabyle literature who was assassinated during the Algerian Revolution, set his 1950 novel, Le fils du pauvre (The poor man's son), in another such mountain village. "I don't want my project to be reduced to a personal quest," Kal said. "My life is not as interesting as the life of Frantz Fanon. We all have roots. We are all mixed. As Édouard Glissant said, "We are all créolisé." For Kal, Mons Ferratus is neither autobiographical nor an affirmation of identity. It is the work of an artist who is free.