In progress: Looking up
By
Sonali Pahwa
Randa Shaath is a Palestinian-Egyptian photographer who has lived in Beirut, Cairo and Minnesota. In addition to working as a photojournalist in Egypt and Palestine, she has exhibited series of photographs of Nubian villages, the forgotten islands of Cairo and the borders of Palestine. In 2003 a collection of her photographs of Egypt, Under the Same Sky, was published by the Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona and Witte de With Gallery, Rotterdam. Her work appears regularly in Al-Ahram Weekly.
I'm on my way to Umea, Sweden to participate in an exhibit of photography, videos, caricature and painting by Cairo-based artists. This is the current stop of the travelling exhibit Contemporary Arab Representations: Cairo that showed in Spain and the Netherlands last year. The backgrounds of our Cairo contingent are interesting variations on Egyptian identity -- Golo is a French cartoonist, Anna Boughigian is Armenian-Egyptian, I am part Palestinian. In the series of exhibits on Arab cities the previous focus was on Beirut, and next year it will be a Moroccan city.
When I was first approached by the curators they suggested an exhibit to coincide with the Biennale of architecture in Rotterdam. The idea appealed to me because I had lived for many years on the 14th floor of an apartment building and had always been interested in the vertical architecture of the city. So I gathered my longstanding rooftops project into a final form.
I noticed several years ago that there was a life on the rooftops of Cairo that few people guessed at as they walked about the streets. In buildings constructed early in the 20th century rooms on the roof were often built for the building's bawwab or other employees. Then their families joined them, these families grew, and there were whole communities living on the rooftops. The city had lives on top of lives. The people on the roof generally do not mix with other residents of the building. There is a stigma to living up there, as if you were a servant, when in fact most rooftop residents do not work in the building. Yet even now they often do not have access to the main staircase or elevator.
Up on the rooftop people sometimes recreate older communities. One roof divided into residents from Nubia and Upper Egypt. You have every aspect of life up there -- I once attended a wedding complete with a DJ, dancing and a henna party. This is what architects often fail to realise when they demand that the rooftops of Cairo be "cleaned". Building owners also do not acknowledge that the rooftop residents are there to stay, and many are not given permission to fix their houses or build bathrooms. When renovations are allowed the results can be striking. Some artists have taken over rooftop rooms and expanded them into studios or apartments with lots of sun and great views.
In another project I looked at a different set of hidden lives in the city. There are three small islands on the Nile, just south of Cairo, where farmers and fishermen live. They supply the city with fish and vegetables -- but their own most basic needs are neglected. The island of Qursaya has no drinking water, clinics or schools. The people of the island come into the city by ferry for their everyday needs. When a bridge was built over the island as part of the ring road project in 1998, the planners did not give the island-dwellers access to it. Two years later a tourism project even tried to evict the islanders in order to build a resort, claiming they had no legal rights of ownership to the land. They fought hard, with petitions and demonstrations, to stay on. But even now it is difficult for them to get their legal claims to the land recognised.
Am I a photojournalist or a photographer? I'm not quite sure. Of late, people from the art world have been approaching me more often. This has not really changed my style. I am a documentary photographer and photography for me is a way of expressing my ideas. In the islands of Cairo project, for instance, I have not simply focussed on the beauty of the islands. I have a point in taking and exhibiting those photographs. These people were about to be expelled so that a hotel could be built and I told their story in pictures. I do not photograph in countries that I don't know and about which I don't have a point of view. In these cases, a postcard would do better.
I have also done projects in Palestine and Yemen. My first effort in Palestine was to document for Agence France-Presse Yasser Arafat's return after 30 years in exile. Then, a later project titled 'The state of Palestine' investigated daily life in Gaza and the West Bank after five years of partial self-rule. A much larger project, involving ten photographers, was a Swiss-funded series on borders. I was chosen to photograph Palestinian- Israeli borders, and it was difficult because I was the only one of the photographers dealing with my own borders. Sometimes I could not cross them. I made a series of trips over four months, until just before the Intifada of 2000. I asked the curators to cancel my project because it did not reflect the situation that had just emerged, but they thought the pictures suggested the brewing discontent and went ahead with the exhibit. At my request, though, they added a letter from a member of the Inad Theatre in Bethlehem who spoke of how things were there at the moment.
The borders project opened in Switzerland and moved on to Mexico, Cairo, South Africa and Russia. It is still on the move. 'The state of Palestine' showed at the Sony Gallery here in Cairo and as a slide show at the University of Texas in Austin, where we had some trouble getting them to accept the title. I have not yet been able to show the pictures of the rooftops and Nile islands here in Cairo since the prints are still in Rotterdam and Barcelona. I have enjoyed exhibiting abroad -- there was an occasion when Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid made a special trip from Leiden for the Rotterdam exhibit -- but real success for me can only be here in my own city. This is why I am excited to have printed a book, a book I can bring back with me to Cairo.
