26 April - 2 May 2001
Issue No.531
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 April - 2 May 2001 Issue No.531 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Those wicked camera wielders
The Garden City villa that now houses the Higher Council for Islamic Affairs boasts an impressive set of gates, an ambitious concoction of twining thistles with beautifully cast flower heads emerging from a mass of foliage that turns the bars of the gates into an extravagantly overburdened trellis. The posts supporting these fantastic constructions (thistles, for the botanically pedantic, are not, of course, climbing plants) are themselves adorned with cast iron faces set within heraldic shields, and support equally ornate lamps that alas no longer work. Before housing the Council the villa was home to Mustafa El-Nahas, Wafd Party leader and five times prime minister. It was here that he resided until his death in 1965, for much of the period following the 1952 Revolution under house arrest.
The villa is opposite the former home of another leading Wafdist, Fouad Serageddin, a building that boasts, if anything, a set of even more impressive, if less ornate, gates. They may not be quite as elaborate as the metalwork opposite, but they are mounted by two magnificent griffins, cast, I was once told, though by a no means always reliable source, in Paris. The griffin on the right hand gate, sadly, is now quite badly damaged, and both are so shrouded in dust that much of the detailing is obscured. Now that the fate of the Serageddin villa hangs in the air -- it is for sale, apparently, for a rumoured LE50 million -- the griffins may not be around for that much longer. Time, perhaps, to take a stroll and view pieces that, in some other place, under some other set of circumstances, might have ended up safely ensconced in a museum devoted to the decorative arts rather than clinging precariously onto their crumbling gateposts and an uncertain future.
Several years ago, along with the photographer Yves Paris, I was privileged enough to see the inside of the old Nahas villa. The circumstances of that visit were not, however, particularly conducive to the viewing or assessment of interior architectural designs. Escorted by several security guards we were detained in a tiny basement room the most striking feature of which were two neon lights. The insistently bright illumination revealed plain white walls and a torn, leatherette sofa on which we sat awaiting the arrival of some more senior security official. The police were, it should be said, perfectly polite, and following the arrival of the senior security person we were immediately offered a cup of tea and an apology. It was just that no one on site seemed to understand that anyone could be even remotely interested in taking a photograph of a set of gates.
Poor Yves. He had been dragged along to take photographs to accompany an article that appeared on these very pages, a decade ago, on architectural metalwork. And it was in researching this piece that I first encountered the Serageddin griffins: Yves took a marvelous photograph, for which we were not arrested, but then Fouad Serageddin, who was still alive and in residence at the time, was hardly in a position to command security personnel.
(The wonderfully realised mythological creatures, incidentally, featured prominently in the article, though no one appears to have taken a blind bit of notice: they continued to be neglected and are now in a sorrier state than ever which says something, perhaps, about the influence of the press.)
Our experience on the other side of the road, however, appears to suggest that security personnel have an ambivalent relationship with camera wielding civilians.
Perhaps it is all a hangover from a more security conscious past, from the fifties and sixties, the era of No Photo, No Photo. It is, though, a persistent hangover, the reification of an attitude that has no basis in anything that can be mistaken for a practical consideration. Still, point a camera at any building that has even the remotest hint of a security man, and it is almost certain that you will be besieged by a gaggle of finger wagging, tut-tutting men, emerging from the shadows and goodness knows where else just to tell you that you cannot. If they are feeling particularly vindictive, and they often are, they will proceed to confiscate your film. And just try and explain that you are simply trying to record a balustrade that looks in danger of imminent collapse, a fanlight or architectural detail that has caught your eye.
Security men and cameras are never going to mix. Only last year, on assignment to photograph the exterior of the newly restored Diplomat's Club on Taalat Harb, in the centre of Downtown Cairo, one of the Weekly's photographers had the film taken out of her camera on the pretext that photographing this building, passed by tens of thousands of pedestrians daily, was forbidden. It is not forbidden, and following a complaint the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were graceful in their apology. The photographer in question, though, would still be cautious about placing herself in the same position again.
What is not forbidden may well not be forbidden: it doesn't really matter, though, if no one bothers to tell the lowly security man standing outside the building. Hence the same photographer's concern, only this morning, to photograph a building she thought might be being demolished from the roof of my apartment block.
Why the roof, I asked?
Because someone is bound to tell me I can't take photos, and they will take the film, she replied.
In the end we simply wandered down the street and took the photographs. There were no problems whatsoever. But then when we inquired from the workmen exactly what they were doing with the villa, it turned out that rather than demolishing it they were giving it a complete overhaul. Renovation, not destruction. Had it been the other way round (the other way round, after all, is a far more common occurrence) it would not have been quite so simple.
No photo, no photo -- how it rings in the ears.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page