Nostalgias old and new
Nigel Ryan on the exhibits that form the core of PhotoCairo
Maha Maamoun's attenuated images of Cairene streets provide a view through an invisible, if very public, letter box. These are fragments, though format and content lend the fragments continuity. They are street-wise by virtue of the simple expedient of horizontality: inverting the skyscraper, they deal with space rather than volume, the spaces punctuated by a severely cropped piece of fabric, a repeated floral print that forms one part or another of a dress. The introduction of the print, rather than acting as a substitute for the natural, operates to denature its setting.
It is an astute balancing act that Maamoun performs, as contrived as the most radically cropped Japanese woodblock, a comparison suggested, perhaps inadvertently, by the appearance of a stylised peony in one of the prints. The result is an oddly disturbing -- and singularly satisfying -- aestheticising of Cairo's streets and of those details -- a segment of the facade of the Mugamma, kerbstones, a passing Metro train, the zebra stripes of taxis -- out of which Maamoun constructs her tightly focussed panoramas. As it aesthetises, this focus on parts acts also to sanitise the whole: it denatures and denudes, populates and depopulates the urban landscape, freezing the contradictions each image frames into momentary coherence. It is the fragility of that coherence, as much as the floral prints, that Maamoun eventually foregrounds, the repetitions emerging as a powerful conceit, an impressive manipulation of the manner in which the process, the very act of taking -- for which read fixing -- images, can be exploited.
Maamoun's eloquence in problematising process becomes uncomfortably polemical in Hala El- Koussy's exhibit. Solitary figures clean cars in garages, walk down streets, sit beneath bus shelters, stand in front of elevators, sit at tables in cafés and restaurants or stand by counters in shops. And all of these scenes are staged, the solitary individuals actors placed by the photographer. We know this because we are told. Such is the level of trust that continues to be posited in this kind of photography, in the capturing of these kinds of scenes, El-Koussy suggests, that attention needs constantly to be drawn to "the fictitious nature of the photographic medium".
Quite whether audiences need to be introduced at such a remedial level to such bits of critical orthodoxy is a moot point: (re)construction - 2003, the title of the exhibit, comes at times a little too close to the theoretical equivalent of a sledgehammer cracking a walnut. It is the images that the spectator is asked to view, after all, and yes they do solicit narratives, and in a familiar way. This is the film still school of image making: it is the kind of thing Edward Hopper did with paint, essentially cinematic, a glimpse that demands a before and an after. So here, at least, ignore the blurb provided: far more rewarding to view this contribution to PhotoCairo as an exploration of the workings of nostalgia -- that these are places with a special resonance for El-Koussy, revisited after a period of absence from the city -- is a significant piece of information, though even that may not be entirely necessary. Value lies in the unravelling of the nostalgia the photographer simultaneously critiques. Get-out clauses so reserved seldom work for long.
Hamdi Attia dissects a television set, wrapping its entrails around the walls of the gallery. And there, in the corner, the television sits. Ostensibly an exploration of "the power of the media as a tool in constructing histories", it doesn't convince in its avowed aim of inserting audiences "into a virtual television set". More a bad wiring job, a nightmare experience of cowboy electricians. It makes spurious claims to the interactive: that it really allows the spectators no choice beyond a control of volume, and a switching of channels that really are the same, is intended. It is one of those concept-led installations the idea for which should be posted on the Internet. A couple of sentences would suffice, and then we might all be spared the chore of having to go and see it.
Jihan Ammar provides one of the more convincing texts to the current exhibitions. Tellingly, by not being staged -- or not theatrically so -- the images themselves raise as many questions as El- Koussy's: indeed, in the simplification of her account Ammar also courts the possibility of alternative narratives, over which she is demonstrably less possessive.
Here there are a great many reflections: faces in the window of a car, faces caught in mirrors. Make- up is being applied. A picnic is being had. It is all so normal, so quotidian, a kind striving after the recording of normalcy that in itself constitutes an ambition achieved. That the ambition is not overweening allows the images their resonance.
Fouad El-Khoury presents by far the largest body of work in the current showing, spanning three decades. It is a catholic selection, including an English road sign, Give Way -- an odd emblem of that most emblematic of counties, Essex -- alongside photographs of downtown Beirut decimated by war, the latter published in 1984 as Beyrouth Aller- Retour, with more images of the city appearing in Beirut City Centre, Paris: Editions du Cyprès, 1993. There are conventional, if stagy, portraits of celebrities, including Mohamed Choukri, Sherihan, Emile Habibi, pictures of holes in concrete, of scraps of advertising stuck on the surface of pock-marked streets. There are some interesting juxtapositions: diptychs and triptychs, often allocated a room to themselves.
Geno's suitcase, open, displaying its contents -- an issue of Der Speigel, a copy of C S Nott's Teachings of Gerdjieff -- hangs next to Marcia's diary, open, though the handwriting is too spidery, too contrived, too tightly packed on the page to be read. And this is a disappointment of sorts, though so stylised is the hand that the photograph is likely to turn its viewers into amateur graphologists. Such is the desire to uncover secrets. We know only that the photographs were taken in Berlin and Marseilles. And again we construct a story.
Other pairings are more heavy-handed. A glass curtained room in Geneva, ostentatious only in its restrained, expensive design, is paired with a room in Turkey, broken chairs piled in the corner of the dingy space. The public and private are effectively interwoven, and El- Khoury is remarkably well-travelled. But in what has been obviously a carefully thought out hanging, the black and white images spot-lit in the darkened, derelict rooms of the deserted Viennoise hotel, it remains frustrating that non-reflective glass was not used.
A far more effectively controlled environment -- constructed by Amgad Naguib -- is housed in the same building. Naguib's mechanical devices, some constructed out of bicycle parts and controlled electrically, others operated by hand, have a satisfyingly half-baked aspect. It is a version of retro sci-fi, an effective display for what are, in effect, cast-offs, old photographs gathered, and in being gathered, saved by Naguib. These you can peer at through periscope-like devices: faces of the nameless, traces of lives now lived pass up and down, or round and round. There is bathos, the inevitable attrition of time, and an awkward end to vanities. There is nostalgia here, too, though it is curiously removed: ersatz, in a way, it is a function of the kindness of the collector.
Naguib's magpie instincts are inverted by Susan Hefuna: images are amassed almost by accident, by the simplest of cameras; whatever contrivance is being exercised is in aging the subjects so captured. If the photographs that emerge are thin, it is the result of a controlled anorexia. Similarly, in the accompanying video piece, Life in the Delta. A camera is placed at a T-junction in a village somewhere in the Delta. It remains static, unobtrusive. Figures enter from both sides of the frame, cross the screen or exit at the bottom, anonymously going about their business about which the spectator knows nothing. It is 100 minutes, and compelling in its frugality.
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