The New Zealander
In collaboration with the New Zealand Embassy, the American University in Cairo's Sony Gallery held a retrospective of the work of John Feeney (1922-2006), widely known as Riverman for his lifetime infatuation with rivers the world over. After filming the Waikato, New Zealand's longest, he embarked on his greatest project -- filming the Nile and, in the process, portraying the daily life of its people with a rare tenderness. Feeney ended up spending a good half of his life based in Cairo.
A story teller and writer as well as a photographer and filmmaker, his stills reflect a profound understanding of Egypt, its people and their development since the Aswan High Dam put an end to Nile floods; this is social history at its best. The word "authenticity" invariably comes to mind in connection with this man. Nursing students looking down the stairway of Ain Shams University Hospital in 1974, circus clowns at the Agouza Theatre in 1979, little girls carrying the jasmine harvest in 1980: here is a profound understanding of the cultural environment combined with masterful application of Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" technique. Experiences ranging from shadow puppet theatre to the candied fruit produced by Groppi's in 1975 inform both the photos and the sensibility with which they were taken.
Feeney's first documentary, The Living Stone (1958), about the Inuit, was produced for the national film board of Canada, but it wasn't until 1963, when he was first invited to visit Egypt to document the Nile's last flood (1964) by the minister of culture, that he came into his own -- photographing, among other things, "the ancient land of Kush", modern Nubia, most of which subsequently disappeared in Lake Nasser. Fountains of the Sun, an 80-minute film shot in cinema-scope tracing the course of the Nile from its sources in the Mountains of the Moon, Uganda, past the White and Blue Niles and into Egypt, took five years to make.
Feeney also depicted president Gamal Abdel-Nasser's phenomenal funeral in 1970, and his image of Ramses II, "Pharaoh [and] god-king [who] commanded his millions of people to work together," in Feeney's own words. He went on, "the earth's first nation state was born here, to endure for more than 3,000 years beside the river, under the sun." A regular contributor of photographs and texts to Aramco World magazine, in which he focussed on the magnificence of Islamic architecture, Feeney also capture Hassan Fathi, the renowned Egyptian architect (1902-1989), in 1980: Fathi sits on his roof and, above his head, the embroidered sky he referred to as "my skyscraper".
Feeney received over 40 prizes for his photography and films, including a British Academy Award, two Belgian gold medals and the Robert Flaherty Award; his work was twice nominated for an Oscar. In the exhibition catalogue, the Director of Sony Gallery S Abdallah Schleifer, a personal friend of Feeney's, says, "When John Feeney arrived in Egypt in 1963 to make Fountains of the Sun, he intended to stay for one year. Instead he stayed for 40. This exhibition is a tribute to that most fortuitous of miscalculations."
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