Her pain is beyond bearing, her suffering so unspeakable that she appears transported elsewhere. For millions of newspaper readers around the world, the face of this woman - who has just learned that her eight children were massacred - crystallised Algeria's tragedy as words never could. In a war allegedly about religion, the photograph resembles a Renaissance painting drawn from the Bible, both terrible and sublime. It was quickly dubbed the Algerian Pieta.
Like most Algerian photographers and journalists, Hocine wishes to be identified only by his first name, for his safety. Later, after his "Madonna in hell" went round the world on the Agence France Presse wire and appeared on the front pages of US, French, British, Spanish and Arab newspapers, he returned to the sacked Algiers suburb of Bentalha, where some 300 people were massacred on September 23rd, to ask survivors to identify her. She had vanished and her name, like those of hundreds of thousands of anonymous, grieving Algerians, may never be known.
Just as Robert Capa's dying Republican soldier epitomised the Spanish Civil War, or the running girl aflame with napalm brought home the horror of the war in Vietnam, Hocine's photograph has become Algeria's icon.
When Hocine drove to Bentalha that morning, he knew what to expect for he has covered dozens of massacres in the past two years. "It was total confusion," he says. "The houses were still burning and there were so many people coming and going that Bentalha seemed like a busy town. The police stopped me - I couldn't even take my camera out. They had put the bodies in a school but they wouldn't let anyone enter."
Hocine then went to the Zmirli Hospital, where families waited for lists of the dead. "I asked a policeman if I could take pictures, and he said No. Then I saw this woman leaning against a guard post, weeping. I took several shots and changed my film before the cops made me hand it over."
After transmitting two frames to Paris, Hocine went home discouraged. "I felt like I hadn't got any good pictures. I only realised the next day, when Paris told me."
Hocine (44) is the eldest of about 20 surviving Algerian war photographers - a half dozen have been killed. He insists on working alone, saying: "I don't want to be responsible for anyone."
In the immediate aftermath of massacres, he has found, "people don't yet realise what has happened. They are surrounded by rescue workers, controlled. It's later, when the emptiness closes in on them, that you see the emotion. I feel very close to these people - and removed from those who aren't living through this".
It has become nearly impossible to work as a photographer in Algeria. "People are much more frightened of a camera than of a Kalashnikov," Hocine says. "They're used to seeing weapons - groups of cops and gendarmes sitting in cafes with their guns and grenades. But if you walk around the streets with a camera, someone will put a bullet in your head. The foreign photographers who come here work with four police bodyguards."
Hocine's "Madonna in hell" has shown that the emotion conveyed by a human face can be more powerful than the ghoulish photos distributed by other agencies. Some editors claim the world will not comprehend what is happening here unless they are shown atrocities. The French magazine, Marianne, recently published an image of two severed children's heads in a bucket, with the caption: "Here are photos of Algeria. Do you want to see them? Or do you prefer Diana?"
Most Algerian war photographers are in their 20s, like Zohra, the leading photographer for El Watan newspaper. They have learned their craft without proper equipment or training.
"When I started out in 1990, I didn't know what kind of photography I wanted to do," Zohra says. "I didn't intend to cover violence."
Chain-smoking and wearing jeans, she looks like an average young European woman. "Today I realise that I am an eye-witness and I feel hardened by it. It makes you grow up. I tell myself that danger is part of my job; if I don't take risks I don't get any pictures."
The image which most marked her, Zohra says, was a front-page photo she took after a car bomb explosion in 1995.
"It was the first time I saw a lot of bodies. I've since understood that you can be a photographer and go back to being a normal person later.
"I was crying while I took that picture. The editor said it was too gruesome, that he couldn't print it. I told him: `That's what I saw; that's what I lived through. You have to run it'."