The Liberty of Appearing

T h e L i be r t y o f A p p e a r i n g P h o t o g r a p h s o f E g yptian working people

by Yasser Alwan

Yasser Alwan’s subjects are sometimes alone, always in a crowd, recognisably Egyptian, resembling everybody else. Every face fixed in its own time and place, enclosed by the universal

Dar al-Sala

ferment. Each scene distinctive unto itself, defined by surrounding circumstance. The powerless abrim with indomitability. Global struggle corralled into an Arab street corner. Still life speaking to the world of how it sees itself. The black-and-white dialectic of the work-a-day life.

Eamonn McCann, author of War and an Irish Town.

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T h e L i be r t y o f A p p e a r i n gDar al-Sala P h o t o g r a p h s o f E g yptian working people

by Yasser Alwan

Edited by Richard Peacock

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First published by Peacock Imprint 2008 www.peacockimprint.co.uk

Edited by Richard Peacock

Publication © Peacock Imprint

Photography & text © Yasser Alwan Introduction © John Molyneux Preface © Nadje Al-Ali All rights reserved

Set 10/14pt in Palatino Linotype

Printed by Witherbys Print, London, EC1R 0ET

Image on front cover: Dar al-Salaam wholesale vegetable market Image on page 4: Umm Reda, Waily, Cairo www.yasseralwan.com

TT-COC-002710

Contents

8 Preface Nadje Al-Ali

11 Introduction John Molyneux 37 Photographing Mohamed Ahmed Yasser Alwan 50 Plates 96 Artist’s biography 98 Acknowledgements

Preface

Unlike other Arab countries, Egypt generally evokes a sense of interest and fascination amongst the British public. Many people I know have already visited its ancient sights, or they are aspiring to do so one day. Tens of thousands of visitors paid a hefty entrance fee and waited for hours queuing for admission to see Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, featuring “over 130 priceless ancient Egyptian antiquities and treasures” exhibited in the O2 Arena in Greenwich. Meanwhile, another major exhibition at the Tate Britain – The Lure of the East – attracts huge crowds to view British artists’ interpretations of Middle Eastern life, “with scenes of bazaars, public baths and home life”. (And lots of voluptuous naked women!)

Although I welcome the great interest in ancient Egyptian civilization, appreciate orientalist paintings and the fact that they are exhibited in a reflective and critical manner, I share Yasser Alwan’s frustration with the ongoing orientalist representation of Arabs – not only by “Westerners” but often by Arabs themselves. (Wealthy Gulf Arabs are the best customers for nouvelle orientalist paintings with markets flourishing in London, Dubai and Beirut.)

Even more disconcerting and dangerous is the flurry of Islamophobic depictions of Arabs as violent and barbaric and potentially terrorist, but also, and equally disturbing, as eternal helpless victims. Yet in trying to challenge racist depictions of Arabs, we are all too easily tempted to highlight comfortable, endearing, familiar images of nice-looking, well-fed, well-educated Arabs.

It is important to show those. But they are not the full story whether you are looking at Arab or western countries for that matter. In Egypt, for example, the structural adjustment agreement with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank signed after the Gulf War in 1991, has worsened the gap between rich and poor where 40% of the 80 million people live under the UN poverty line of US$2 per day. While President Hosni Mubarak continues to be portrayed as a “good leader” – on the right side of the equation in the context of the war on terror – the Mubarak regime has increasingly cracked down on any form of dissent, including that by political activists, journalists and bloggers, but also Egyptian workers who protest against the rising food prices, high inflation and worsening living conditions.

However, Yasser Alwan’s powerful and beautiful, even if often disturbing, photographs, do not show workers’ dissent, but their pursuit of the every-day. Through his sensitive, aesthetic and culturally informed lens, Alwan’s work not only subverts and challenges our myopic vision but also creates an artistically sophisticated and politically significant intervention into the currently available repertoire of representations of Arabs.

Dr Nadje Al-Ali Reader in Gender Studies SOAS, University of London Author of Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Books, 2007)

The Liberty of Appearing The photography of Yasser Alwan John Molyneux

Yasser Alwan’s photographs express a profound humanitarian egalitarianism that is rare in the long history of art as a whole and almost unique in the relatively short history of photography. ‘Photographs of Egyptian working people’ – already this bare factual description raises a multitude of issues and announces an artistic and political stance.

We live in a culture – and by this I mean the total culture of global capitalism and the total historical culture of western and non-western civilisations – in which working people (peasants, agricultural labourers, slaves, artisans, manual and non-manual proletarians) are massively underrepresented. For the last 5000 years working people have been the immense majority of humanity, but in the world’s poetry, drama, novels, film, TV, visual art, etc. – music and dance may be a partial exception – their presence is marginal.

From Homer to Hollywood working people are the extras, the walk on parts. For every painting of peasant life by Brueghel, for every etching of a beggar by Rembrandt, there are a hundred, maybe a thousand portraits of emperors, kings, queens, aristocrats and bourgeois. This is not prejudice but a simple reflection of reality. In class divided societies, i.e. every society after the transition from foraging to agriculture, the upper classes are few but important and the working classes,

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Helwan limestone quarry, workers series, 1998-2000

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Helwan limestone quarry

the common people, are many but unimportant. Against this background any artist who, like Yasser Alwan, turns this hierarchy upside down and places working people centre stage, is making a political statement.

Add the designation ‘Egyptian’ to the class category and the magnitude of the under representation increases many fold. This is something that applies not just to Egypt, though Egypt has its particularities in this narrative, but to all ‘nonwestern’ societies and cultures. The Eurocentric view of history, developed alongside racism, as an ideological accompaniment to material conquest, credits Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt with the birth of civilisation and then moves swiftly to Ancient Greece and Rome, from which point the non-European world simply disappears except, exclusively, as an object of European discovery and military engagement. The result is a profound ignorance. The ONLY figures from Egyptian history between Cleopatra and Nasser, known at all to the western public are Salah ad-Din (Saladin) from the Crusades and, perhaps to a few, Mohammed Ali. Ask a British university class (I have tried this often) to name three non-western artists, three non-western scientists, three poets, three philosophers, and you are setting a test which the large majority are destined to fail – the odd ‘Frida Kahlo’ and ‘Confucius’ and the rest is blank. Results would not be much better among the faculty.

Of course it is a question of the nature of the representation as much as its quantity. Racial, gender, orientalist and colonial stereotyping have all been substantially explored in academic and cultural circles in recent decades, but class has received less attention. However, we should remember that while Shakespeare gives us Othello, Shylock, and Cleopatra (each, incidentally, an achievement of genius) his ‘common people’ are rendered in prose and offer only comic interludes, albeit pointed ones. And what John Berger wrote about Dutch genre painting (painting of ‘low life’) of the 17th century applies to many subsequent representations of working people.

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Odd jobber, tanneries, workers series, 1998-2000

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Helwan limestone quarry, workers series, 1998-2000

The purpose of the ‘genre’ picture was to prove – either positively or negatively – that virtue in this world was rewarded by social and financial success. Thus, those who could afford to buy these pictures… had their own virtue confirmed. Such pictures were particularly popular with the newly arrived bourgeoisie.1

Even artists and writers avowedly sympathetic to working people have often produced representations of them that were highly problematic. Thus George Orwell, who broke with his middle class public school background to the extent of living (for a time) with the poor and down and out, and fighting with the POUM in the Spanish Civil War, and who wrote in 1984 that ‘If there is hope… it lies in the proles’, nevertheless depicted those proles as narrow, animalistic creatures more or less incapable of consciousness and higher feelings, while in Animal Farm they were represented by the carthorse Boxer, who was congenitally stupid. Even Brecht never produced a play foregrounding working class characters. (I say this not to criticise Brecht – possibly the greatest playwright of the century – but to show the difficulty of the task.)

This, then, is the general context, in which Yasser Alwan’s photographs of Egyptian working people demand ‘the liberty of appearing’. But, of course, Alwan’s work also exists in the specific context of the history of photography, which to some extent constitutes a special case. On the one hand, the relative cheapness and availability of its means of production (the camera) and the ease of mechanical reproduction of its output, gives photography a democratic character absent from its adjacent art forms, painting and film.

As a result there is a substantial tradition of the sympathetic photography of working people running from early photographers such as John Thompson, through the Americans, Lewis B.Hine, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, the German August Sander, Brassai and Cartier Bresson in 1:

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin 1988, p103

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France, to the contemporary Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado, and in which Alwan consciously stands.

On the other hand, there is in photography – due to its mechanical and instant character – a potential for domination, coldness and cruelty not present, or not present to the same degree, in painting or drawing. This is manifested in its language – the photographer ‘captures’,’ shoots’ and ‘snaps’ her subject; in its role in social control (mug shots, ID, passports, etc.) and as handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism (lucidly analysed and illustrated by Alwan himself in his superb study of the photographs of Lehnert and Landrock, Imagining Egypt, Cairo, 2007) and in the paparazzi phenomenon. In the world of art photography it has given rise to the elements of the freak show, objectification, mockery and exploitation, found in varying degrees in the work of Diane Arbus, Joel-Peter Witkin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Martin Parr – a tendency to which Alwan is consciously opposed.

One way of grasping the stature of Alwan’s work is by means of comparison with some of his photographic forebears. Lewis Hine photographed child labour in the US at the beginning of the last century to expose it and promote social reform. He photographed workers building the Empire State, suspended in the sky above Manhattan, to demonstrate the extraordinary skill and courage of working people in their daily lives. Alwan is also opposed to child labour, supports social reform and is aware of workers’ amazing feats in their work, but this is not the driving force of his photography.

The driving force of Brassai’s photography is the evocation of an atmosphere – the atmosphere of nighttime Paris in the thirties, of Montmartre and Montparnasse. There are some photos of working men at Les Halles, but they are subordinate to the prostitutes, carnival performers, lovers, and petty gangsters of bohemia, and the individuals in the pictures are subordinate to the overall ambience. Cartier Bresson is certainly interested in ordinary people but what governs his photography

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Limestone Grinding Mill, Kom Ghurab, Coptic Cairo, workers series, 1998-2000

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06 Tanneries, workers series, 1998

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is capturing the ‘decisive moment’ when those ordinary people can be configured in a brilliant composition. August Sander, who has been a big influence on Alwan, set out to document the German people of the twenties by ‘type’ according to a systematic classification, rather as in Engels’ classic prescription for realism, ’the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances’.

At first sight it might appear that Alwan is trying to do something similar for Egypt but any attempt at system is subverted by his interest in the particular subject, as a person, and this gives his work a human warmth lacking in Sander. In fact there are echoes of all these photographers in Alwan but his work is distinguished from all of theirs by its greater engagement with and representation of the personalities of his subjects.

Take, for example, the photographs of the woman trader at Umm Reda, Waily (no. 08) and the Incense Man (no. 07) at Dar al-Salaam.

Both are obviously poor – everyone at that level of society in Egypt is poor – but neither is photographed to represent poverty; nor are they there for their typicality. Rather it is their individuality, their respective specific spirit, that has drawn Alwan, and that Alwan has communicated in his superb photographs.

Alwan is interested in individual people. It sounds like a cliché, and a bourgeois cliché at that, but the moment you insert class into the statement – individual working people – it becomes artistically and politically highly charged. An intellectual who, in life, is genuinely interested, as an equal, in specific working class people is a rarity, and one who is interested in them artistically is even more rare.

The notion that working people are simple, that they have simple ideas and emotions, compared to the complexity of the middle classes, is a prejudice with five millennia of class society behind it. Breaking with it as Alwan has done, not just in theory but organically as an artist has to do if the break is to be realised in their work, speaks of an art and a politics far more radical than that of social reform, the New Deal, or the Popular Front.

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M’bakharrati (Incense Man), Dar al-Salaam, workers series, 1998-2000

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Umm Reda, Waily, Cairo, 1998

Two political points need clarification here. The first concerns the suffering of working people. In the world today, working people suffer relentlessly, unforgivably and on an unimaginable scale, but those for whom, in the words of Marx, ‘the proletariat exists only as the most suffering class’, miss the main point which is the capacity of working people to resist, to end their suffering, and to emancipate themselves and humanity. The second concerns the relation between the individual and the collective. It often assumed that an emphasis on the individual is bourgeois and right wing, while stressing collective interests and collective struggle is proletarian and left wing.

There is an important element of truth in this in that the working class must struggle collectively to defend its interests and change society, but it can easily be overstated and becomes damaging if it is understood as opposition to the individual, individual development and freedom. This was not Marx’s view. For Marx there was always a dialectical interaction between the individual and the social.

The communists do not put egoism against self-sacrifice or selfsacrifice against egoism… they are very well aware that egoism just as much as self-sacrifice is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self assertion of individuals. Hence the communists by no means want… to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general” self-sacrificing man.1 What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of “Society” as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being.2 In place of the old bourgeois society… we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.3

How do these theoretical points translate into the language of photography and how do they relate to Alwan’s photographs 1: 2: 3:

The German Ideology, London 1991, p105 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow 1967, p98 The Communist Manifesto

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09 Tanneries, workers series, 1999

10 Tanneries, workers series, 1999

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in particular? The capacity of workers for resistance and self emancipation can, of course, be shown in photographs of strikes, picket lines, demonstrations etc. Such photographs are absolutely necessary, just as leaflets, banners and posters are necessary, but they are also artistically limited. (Artistically, the best demo photos I have seen are by Tina Modotti, but they tend to sacrifice the demonstrators and their aims to the achievement of a brilliant almost abstract composition).

Another possibility is to produce idealised images of well toned workers gazing determinedly into the future. This was the Stalinist way and it was politically and artistically false. Yasser Alwan’s way is to show that working people, despite poverty and toil, remain complex and dignified human beings, damaged but not utterly defeated, with their own take on life and the world.

Consider for example the photos taken in the Tanneries. These show men and boys working in hellish conditions, that probably condemn them to early graves, and this is an essential part of their story but not the whole story. The key photographs in the series – the boy looking out from beneath the hides on his head (no. 11) and the seated young man squarely facing the camera with a cigarette in his fingers (no. 03) – say more than this.

In the eyes of the boy, almost welling up with tears, we see BOTH pain at the almost unendurable weight (physical and metaphorical) pressing on his shoulders AND determination to carry on, with just a glint of hope for the future. A similar contradiction beats in the breast of the seated young man as he bites his lip and looks quizzically at the camera, trying to make sense of his oppressive world.

Then there are the pictures of the limestone quarry diggers at Helwan, south of Cairo – I have been to Helwan, it is an aptly named place. The long shot gives us the overall scene and the sense of the searing heat of the desert. The close ups show us the specifics of their work, bent double, wielding their axes with pinpoint accuracy, releasing precisely cut blocks of great weight to be shouldered and shifted by hand. Then, suddenly, there is

11 Tanneries, workers series, 1999

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Gezira Club Horse Races, 95-97

the picture of the single digger with the white turban, poised with his pickaxe ready to strike (no. 01). Of course it is a work picture, he is about to smite the limestone not the international bourgeoisie… and yet…! It is an astonishing photograph.

It might seem that the photographs taken at the Gezira races don’t fit this argument. Not so. Throughout the world the poor gamble – even though gambling increases their poverty. The rich gamble too but in a different way and for different reasons, to show off, to display their wealth or their masculinity, to inject risk into their risk free lives. The poor, especially the older poor, gamble for the right to dream.

For the price of a lottery ticket they buy the right to a secret fantasy life for a day or a week. For the price of a few betting slips they purchase hours of intense engagement with life, hours when they can pit their wits against the system and ‘win’, get something for nothing, get paid without working!

Of course they don’t really win, but sometimes they do. And where else in poor people’s lives do they ever win, where else can they take on the man and not be instantly crushed?

The gambler is not a man resisting politically, but he is a man resisting in his own way, refusing to give in completely and he is a person not just a type.

He is the white haired man in plate 10 (p.59) about to put a cigarette to his lips (what a great photograph this is) who, at least outwardly, has kept his dignity, even a little of his authority and certainly his manners. He is the wiry old man with a strange peaked cap and a sheet of paper in his hands (plate 1, p.50) – a list of runners, a form guide? What has he been in life? Where did the hat come from and what does it signify? The hopes of the man in the white jellabiya who screws up his eyes to gaze at the results board (no. 12) may be reduced to the outcome of the 3.30 but they are hopes none the less.

Everyone who appears in an Alwan photograph is shown in a social context that constrains and shapes them, but does not totally define them. Each is a person and personality in his or

her own right, making their lives albeit in circumstances not of their own choosing. This is what I mean by the ‘profound humanitarian egalitarianism’ of this work.

‘The Liberty of Appearing’, the title of this exhibition, is a double reference. It is taken from a sentence in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man ‘But such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.’ But this quotation also appears in The Family of Man, the book of Edward Steichen’s famous photography exhibition from 1955. Both references are appropriate for these photographs but the phrase also points in a third direction.

At the beginning of this essay I spoke of the cultural invisibility of working people, especially working people in the poorer parts of the world. In recent years however the working people of Egypt have been making themselves steadily more visible. Paradoxically, working people make themselves most visible when, together, they stop working i.e. when they go on strike. This, Egyptian workers have been doing with increasing frequency. Earlier this year food riots caused by rising prices were followed by a wave of strikes emanating from the Mahalla textile factory, the largest workplace in the region. In political circles the name Mahalla has become symbolic of working class struggle internationally.

The objective political importance of Egyptian workers is also becoming ever clearer. This is the largest and potentially most powerful working class in the whole region between Europe and India, that is in the central battleground for the control of energy supplies, and the front line between imperialism and anti-imperialism. It holds the key to the defeat of the brutal Mubarak regime and hence to the overthrow of the other pro-US dictatorships in the area, which in turn would open the door to the defeat of Zionist Israel, in a way that is beyond the power of the Palestinians acting alone.

There is a photographic/artistic reference point here as well as a political one. The photographer whose work might seem to precede, and even preempt Alwan’s is Sebastiao Salgado. But

13 Gezira Club Horse Races, 95-97

14 Gezira Club Horse Races, 95-97

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Kom Ghurab, Coptic Cairo, workers series, 1998-2000

there is a fundamental difference. Salgado’s photographs of the Serra Palado gold mine in Brazil are brilliant but his study of workers as a whole, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, is premised on the mistaken (though widely held) notion that the working class is in the process of disappearing.

This affects the photography. Salgado, deliberately I think, gives his pictures a grainy elegiac quality as he commemorates this dying breed and so engages in a kind of romantic myth-making. There is none of this in Alwan whose working people are insistently present in the here and now and have no need of idealisation.

And in fact the world working class is here, is present, in Korea and China, Indonesia and India, the Middle East and South America, in larger numbers than ever before in history.

Concentrated in great cities like Sao Paolo, Mumbai, Canton, Mexico City, it possesses awesome potential power. Cairo is one of the greatest of these cities and the Egyptian working class is a key contingent in this international army.

Yasser Alwan’s photographs do not give us the demos, strikes and uprisings, but they give us the people in all their human contradictions. It is highly appropriate that this exhibition should appear at a time when these people may be about to take ‘the liberty of appearing’ on the centre of the world stage. There is a chance, only a chance but a real chance nonetheless, that the young brick and shingle maker who shoulders a bucket the size of his torso and whose face is obscured by his own arm (no. 15) and the boy with folded arms who is on the front cover of this book will grow up to make history.

John Molyneux 27 August 2008

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Helwan limestone quarry, workers series, 1998-2000

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Helwan limestone quarry, workers series, 1998-2000

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Tanneries, workers series, 1998-2000

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Mechanic, Dar al- Salaam, workers series, 1998-2000

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Limestone Grinding Mill, Kom Ghurab, Coptic Cairo, workers series, 1998-2000

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Limestone Grinding Mill, Kom Ghurab, Coptic Cairo, workers series, 1998-2000

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Thread Maker, Qayt Bey, workers series, 1998-2000

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Thread Maker, Qayt Bey, workers series, 1998-2000

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Photographing Mohamed Ahmed Yasser Alwan

The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political… And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him every day, that there can be no change.

Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing

I Anyone can make a photo of an Egyptian at work. Any tourist can photograph the thousands of peddlers, hawkers, drivers, sailors, guides, waiters, guards, and manual labourers who work at or near the innumerable tourist sites around Egypt.

Or even easier, she can photograph any scene from inside her bus as it drives down Pyramids Road, or she can make a photo of someone at work while walking the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor or Aswan. A journalist can photograph people working throughout Cairo or any other place in Egypt because I assume that a journalist knows the country better than the average tourist. Any other person can also photograph someone at work here using a simple mobile telephone.

So what makes a photograph of an Egyptian worker worth making? The tourist would probably make such a photograph as

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Friday flea market, Imam al-Shafi’i, workers series, 1998-2000

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Going to a Saint’s Day Festival, Sayeda Zaynab, 1997

part of her memories of Egypt: maybe because that kind of work didn’t exist in her country; or because the worker was especially graceful or talented; or because the worker was doing something dangerous without any safety precautions, which is very common here. Or she might have made the photo because of the contrast she noticed between her situation and the worker’s.

The photojournalist would probably make more than one photograph of Egyptians at work or photograph different kinds of workers at several places, or the different kinds of work within one particular industry – probably as part of her job.

After fifteen years in Egypt, I can’t say that many tourists are deliberately making photos of people at work here, though they make lots of photos of ordinary Egyptians. However, photojournalists, for professional reasons, make images of people at work in Egypt. Of course, the workers might photograph themselves but probably not while at work. They would do that during celebrations or at the studio for an “official” family or wedding portrait, or for an ID. Most manual and even skilled labourers earn a very meagre living in this country, so their labour is probably not something that they would want to record: because there’s a good chance that they don’t enjoy their work, or find it demeaning because it pays badly, or because the conditions they work in are appalling, or because some people treat them with less respect for the job that they do. What workers would want to remember are weddings and birthdays and graduations and births: happy events, events worth remembering and therefore recording.

What then would the photos of the tourist or photojournalist or passerby look like? The photo would record what the worker looked like and what he was wearing and doing, whether he was working alone or with others; it would record the place he was in, and give a sense of the time of day. The photo would tell us if the photographer was close by or far away when he made the photo, that is, if he was part of the worker’s situation or looking at it from the outside – somewhat like looking at fish

26 Photographer’s backdrop, Dessouq, Delta, 2002

27 Ad for Fish Shop, King Faisal Street, Cairo, 2002

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Al Hussein, portraits, 1999

inside a fish tank. Funny enough, in Egypt it is the tourists who are in the fish tank (the buses that transport them from place to place) looking out. This type of photo provides a kind of understanding that is based on the accurate rendering of detail that photography is so good at. It communicates the precision of the situation, but it usually falls short of sounding an attitude, except perhaps in the most basic way.

I will make the ‘impossible to prove’ suggestion that most of the photos we’ve ever seen of ordinary Egyptians (at work or not) have been made by tourists or photojournalists – in part because tourism and journalism are activities that are inseparable from photography, and in part because no one else is interested.

If I’m right, this means that our visual knowledge of labour and labourers in Egypt – and probably of Egyptians in general – basically comes from billion-dollar industries that are part and parcel of the world’s socio-economic and political conditions.

Photography’s remarkable ability for accurate, “indexical” recording enabled the medium to penetrate almost every field of human activity – and thus revolutionized the way we see the world. It made visual information the most pervasive in today’s world. In fact, Europeans first saw the world “accurately” as armchair tourists – through photographs in the 19th century.

Early anthropologists, for example, often used photography in their research. Some of these photos showed Africans or Asians standing against a grid background with an arm outstretched on a metal stand – like a specimen for measurement. Even the photos that showed the world’s peoples in their natural settings were made with the assumption that the anthropologist came from a more advanced culture than the people being studied.

Early medical research on the mentally disturbed drew the similar boundaries – this time between normal and abnormal – and used photos to “prove” their hypotheses.

Tourism and journalism are embedded with this photographic history. Tourists or photojournalists have a certain kind of relationship to the people in their pictures because their

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photography stems from either the entertainment or mass communication industries that brought them to Egypt in the first place. In this sense, the photos are the physical remains – like archeological remains – of this relationship. Because they are accurate and because millions of people have made billions of such images for well over a century, tourist photos – made for fun and memory – take on an ideological dimension.

This is even more true of journalistic photos because they make a direct claim for truth based on their accuracy. These activities have transformed a certain kind of human relationship into visual facts.

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Yehia, Darb al-Ahmar, 1986

Some scholars and critics have argued that the invention of photography also freed painting to move in the direction of impressionism. Yet my favorite portrait painter, Franz Hals, lived in the 17th century and painted his subjects both realistically and accurately. One quality that makes so many of Hals paintings special to me is that – long before the idea of the instantaneous was embodied through photography – they feel like instantaneous moments, because the expressions and gestures and the light of many of his subjects are ephemeral.

Can the precision recording and instantaneity that are inherent to photography be combined with the kind of understanding that Franz Hals brought to his medium and to his subjects?

I first went to the races at the once very posh Gezira Club – which at one time did not allow Egyptian members – with a friend’s uncle. I began going every weekend and eventually started photographing the small community of men who bet at the track. They reminded me of the guys hanging out at the Off-Track Betting joints around New York City. By the end of the third season, I’d met almost every single person who came to bet regularly – and everyone knew me. The crowd was always made up of the horses’ owners – members of the Gezira or other

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Trash collector, Kom Ghrab, Coptic Cairo, workers series, 1998-2000

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Baker, Manshiyet Nasser, workers series, 1998-2000

elite clubs – and the betting public who turned up from every part of popular Cairo.

My time with these men ultimately led me to their own neighborhoods, the areas where the vast majority of the city’s population lives. Through personal contacts, two very different neighbourhoods – Waily and Dar al-Salaam whose nickname is Popular China – became the focus of my photography, and I even set up a darkroom in Dar al-Salaam. The years I spent photographing there turned into a body of work about labour and labourers, and that then led me to photograph people waiting at bus stops. I hope that my photos offer a sense of dialogue with their subjects because they are very personal images. I did not impose myself on the people I photographed; I didn’t snap a few images and disappear. Especially during my time in Waily and Dar al-Salaam, I earned the privilege of photographing the people I was with. That this body of work can become more than images of my personal connection to these people means that in some way the broader social, economic and political situation of Egypt echoes in them.

III Growing up in America in the 1970s and 80s made me extremely sensitive to people’s preconceived ideas of Arabs – and led me to think about how and why people develop such notions. I’ve suggested that photography in tourism and mass communication has a strong impact on the way we see Egyptians in general. Usually unintentionally, such photos reinforce our previous stereotypes: about labourers, about people from Egypt, about Arabs, or about people from the Third World. We only see what we’ve seen before.

As a kid, teenager and adult, the people I met in America treated me like anyone else they were meeting for the first time – until they learned my name. In 1970s America and perhaps even today, most Americans had never met an Arab before. In

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Al-Ghouriya, portraits, 1999

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my brother’s case, that made no difference because no one could associate Nowfal with Arabs or Arab culture.

My name was associated with Yasser Arafat, whom the mainstream media portrayed as the devil incarnate. Many people made jokes or turned away or looked horrified, or sometimes worse. Meeting me always created tension among Americans. They even linked crises in the Arab world like the 1973 October War between Egypt, Syria and Israel or the Lebanese civil war with me in a direct way. Imagine how many Americans would react to meeting someone called Osama after September 11, 2001.

All generalizations are dangerous but I can say without hesitation that mainstream media coverage of the Arab world had a direct impact on my life. When I was lucky enough to win a grant to come to Egypt in 1986, the intersection between my passion for photography and my personal background changed the course of my life. Before arriving here, I naively thought that I would have immediate access to this culture because of my background; instead I discovered that I knew absolutely nothing about Egypt. The only thing I did know is that I would have to make photos differently from others who had photographed here before. These images are the result of that long learning process. They record lots of information, but I also hope that they are poetry.

Yasser Alwan Cairo, August 2008

46

33

Geziret Dar al-Salaam, portraits, 1998

47

The Liberty of Appearing Plates

Plate 01

50

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

Plate 02

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

51

Plate 03

52

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

Plate 04

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

53

Plate 05

54

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

Plate 06

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

55

Plate 07

56

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

Plate 08

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

57

Plate 09

58

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

Plate 10

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

59

Plate 11

60

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

Plate 12

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

61

Plate 13

62

Dar al-Salaam, workers series, 1998-2000

Plate 14

Zayn al-Abidin, portraits, 1999

63

Plate 15

64

Fayeda Kamel, workers series, 1998-2000

Plate 16

Geziret Dar al-Salaam, workers series, 1998-2000

65

Plate 17

66

Al Hussein after Friday prayers, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 18

Sayeda Zaynab Square, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

67

Plate 19

68

Al Hussein after Friday prayers, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 20

Sayeda Zaynab Square, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

69

Plate 21

70

Al Hussein after Friday prayers, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 22

Azhar Street, bus stop series, 2000-2001

71

Plate 23

72

Ataba Square, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 24

Ataba Square, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

73

Plate 25

74

Manshiyet Nasser, portraits, 1999

Plate 26

Sayeda Zaynab, portraits, 1999

75

Plate 27

76

Azhar Street, Cairo, portraits, 2000-2001

Plate 28

Ataba Square, bus stop series, Cairo, 2000-2001

77

Plate 29

78

Ahmad Yehia, Darb al-Ahmar, Cairo, portraits, 2000

Plate 30

Magazine seller, Sayeda Zaynab, workers series, 1998-2000

79

Plate 31

80

Breakfast, Al-Hilmiya al-Gedida, portraits, 1999

Plate 32

Al-Gamaliya, Islamic Cairo, portraits, 1999

81

Plate 33

82

Al Nasseriya, Sayeda Zaynab, workers series, 1998-2000

Plate 34

Friday flea market, Iman al-Shafi’i, workers series, 1998-2000

83

Plate 35

84

Is’aaf, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 36

Al-Geish Street, Ataba Square, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

85

Plate 37

86

Port Said Street, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 38

Sayeda Zaynab Square, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

87

Plate 39

88

Azhar Street, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 40

Beni Suef, Egypt, portraits, 1999

89

Plate 41

90

Geziret Dar al-Salaam, portraits, 1999

Plate 42

Geziret Dar al-Salaam, portraits, 1999

91

Plate 43

92

Al Hussein after Friday prayers, Cairo, bus stop series, 2000-2001

Plate 44

Gezira Club Horse Races, 1995-97

93

Plate 45

94

Tanneries, workers series, 1998-2000

Plate 46

Darb al Ahmar, portraits, 1999

95

Yasser Alwan Artist’s biography

Yasser Alwan was born in Lagos, Nigeria to Iraqi parents in 1964. He lived in Lebanon and Iraq before his family moved to New York City in 1972. After dropping out of the photography program at the Rahode Island School of Design, he completed a BA in French literature from a small liberal arts college (Colby) in Maine.

Upon graduation in 1986, he received a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship to write, photograph and travel in Egypt. In 1992, he completed a History MA at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of George town University in order to continue his photography in the Arab world.

He moved to Jordan in 1992 where he worked as a freelance writer, editor, and translator to support his photography. In 1994, he began teaching English composition at the American University in Cairo.

He left AUC in 1998 after receiving a grant from the Royal Netherlands and Swiss Embassies in Cairo to complete a photo project focusing on human rights.

Scream, a catalogue of the resulting exhibition was published in 2000. Some of these photographs were awarded the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography prize in 2001.

He has written the introduction to Imagining Egypt, a book of photographs by Lehnert and Landrock published in 2007. His photographs have been exhibited in Cairo, New York, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Canterbury and London.

Ya s s e r A l w a n . c o m

PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS

July, 2005, The World Affairs Council, San Francisco, CA

December 11-18, 2003, The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo

May 9-July 15, 2001 Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco, CA

Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography group exhibition winners January 8-25, 2001, The Panopticon Gallery, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

January 25-February 8, 2000, The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Cairo, Egypt February 11-March 6, 1996, Ewart Gallery, The American University in Cairo, Egypt November 21-26, 1995, Foyer des GroĂ&#x;en Saals, Burgerhaus, Frankfurt, Germany LECTURES

* Re-Mapping the Arab World: Photography and Orientalism, University of Exeter, April 18, 2001 presented at the Conference: Orientalism Reconsidered: Emerging Perspectives in Contemporary Arab & Islamic Studies

* Documentary Photography in Egypt, Berry College, Mount Berry, Georgia, March 27, 2000; The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, April 6, 2000; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, April 13, 2000

* Photography and the Invention of Reality, The American University in Cairo, Oriental Hall, February 26, 1996 * Women and Photography in Egypt, a lecture in conjunction with the Women and Memory Study Group, The New Civic Forum, Cairo, September 28, 1996

PUBLICATIONS

Articles published in The Ahram Weekly, Cairo, Egypt: * So Long As We Can Say, 28 April-5 My, 1994 * The Real Invisible, 23 February-1 March, 1994

Articles published in The Star, Amman, Jordan: * The Art of Photography, March 4, 1993 * The Illusion of Democracy, June 17, 1993

Opinion Essays published in The Jordan Times, Amman, Jordan: * The Mystique of the Occident, September 22, 1992 * Double Standards and Finger-Pointing: Which Direction?, October 1, 1992 * Catch-22 or a Fragmented Democracy, October 12, 1992 * Photography and the Invention of Reality, November 5, 1992 * Cars and Car Culture, November 10, 1992 * Of Heroes and Hero-Worship, December 8, 1992 * Oil and Vinegar, December 31, 1992 * Welcome to Colonial Society, January 19, 1993

Acknowledgements –Yasser Alwan Had it not been for a chance meeting in 1985 with Nancy Bekavac, the director of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, none of this photography would have happened. Nancy made a dream possible, something I would not have been able to do on my own, and I will always be indebted to her for changing the course of my life.

I would never have met Nancy had it not been for my mother, Sajida Abu Tabikh and my uncle, Mohamed Bakir Alwan. My mother made sure that art was part of my life as a child, and Bak encouraged my photography – and stood up for me even in the face of staunch resistance from the rest of my family.

Fellow photographer, Manal Kamal, introduced me to Cairo’s art circles; our discussions and disagreements about art and photography in Egypt helped me understand my new context and ultimately made me a better photographer. Another photographer, Chris Langtvet, always told me in his bighearted way whether the pictures I made were worthwhile or not. Now in Canada, Chris’ intuition and honesty and eye are dearly missed.

My friend Shahnaz Rouse did her best to educate me in areas where my ignorance was astounding. In her unassuming way Shahnaz taught me more than I learned during my formal education; she’s been simultaneously

my most implacable and gentlest critic and I’m grateful to her for that generosity.

Nadje Al-Ali, Abdul Mawla Ismail, Osama Hammouda, Hassan Saber and Manar Hussein, each in their own way, opened my eyes to different aspects of this country. Their friendship has made Egypt my home.

These exhibitions and this catalogue would not have been possible without the unsparing efforts of John Molyneux and Richard Peacock.

John took my photographs to England, showed them to various people and exhibited them at Marxism in 2007. Then he and Richard began nothing less than a campaign to bring my work to a larger audience.

Richard Peacock has written grant proposals, organized a team of people to promote the exhibitions, met printers, musicians, and poets, and undertaken the massive job of running the whole show. To this day, we have not met.

In one year’s time, John and Richard have taken my photos out of the box where they’d been buried for years and made them public.

For their generosity and commitment to the kind of politics that made this come about, I would like to dedicate this catalogue to them.

Yasser Alwan Cairo, 2008

Publisher’s note and acknowledgements At the time of publication The Liberty of Appearing Project comprises three planned exhibitions of around 50 of Yasser’s prints which will run from October 2008 – December 2008, with a further three UK exhibitions planned for 2009.

The first exhibition is to be held at Photochats in Chats Palace Arts Centre in Hackney, East London as part of East London Photomonth before moving to The Gallery at Foyles in Foyles bookstore on Charing Cross Road, London. It then transfers to the School of Art, Design & Media at the University of Portsmouth.

The publisher would like to acknowledge and thank the following people who donated their time, expertise, experience and skills to the project.

Without their hard work and kindness none of this would have happened.

Peter Young Angela Stapleford Amy Jowett Anna Paczuska Rich Moth Mike Simons Lizzy Fleming Karli Boutle Willow Grylls Jonny Voss Red Saunders Jacqueline Mair

We gratefully acknowledge the support and financial assistance from The Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust without which it would have been harder to publish this book and complete the Yasser Alwan photography project.

We hope that this book of photographs of working people of Egypt helps to further the aims and objectives of the trust.

We also thank the Arts Council of England for their generous assistance which has supported the project as a whole and made it possible for Yasser to travel to the UK. In particular we would like to acknowledge the invaluable help and advice of Rebecca Bruns.

The Gallery at Foyles Lisa Brophy Tanuja Bhogal

Notes

Notes

These are wonderful photographs. They are very simple,

the subjects shine out, and here is humanity without any sentimentality. Yasser takes you there: you get a feel of this city, this is a real world and it’s a hard world.

Red Saunders, photographer & founder Rock Against Racism.

YasserAlwan.com