No heat wave could stop me from my daily journey, usually starting around noon and ending before midnight, from Heliopolis to Downtown Cairo to attend the 11 days of the Cairo Photo Week that ran from 8 to 18 May this year.
Every day there was the opportunity to explore different images displays and different stories told on the walls of Khedival Cairo.
Wandering from Talaat Harb Street to Kasr Al-Nil to attend a talk, discover a new exhibition in venues I had never been before, although once a Downtown resident, was a keen pleasure. The transformation the area is going through is impressive.
The fourth edition of the photo week took place under the title of “Finding the View,” and this might raise questions like where is photography and filmmaking going and what are their future in the age of AI?
Nevertheless, this year’s edition was extraordinary for its diversity. Organised by the Photopia Cairo photographers’ hub, an independent photography school founded in 2012, there were 26 exhibitions in 16 venues across Cairo, and 16 figures from the international industry had been invited to give talks, run workshops, and engage in panel discussions and portfolio reviews.
Around 100 talks took place in the 11 days of the event, bearing witness to Photopia’s continuous support for Egypt’s photographers. One of its aims is to let photographers get together and network with their role model internationally known photographers of all genres, notably through the organisation of the Cairo Photo Week, creating interactions and opportunities to take part in international photography competitions like those run by National Geographic and World Press Photo (WPP).
Funded by the European Union and in collaboration with EUNIC Egypt, Photopia called photographers from different governorates to take part in the photo week. Sixteen photographers from 13 cities were accepted to joined the photo week.
As has been the case in previous years, the centre of the event was Downtown Cairo’s iconic Cinema Radio on Talaat Harb Street, which the Al-Ismaelia Real Estate Investment Company, the main sponsor of the event, renovated in 2011 and turned it into a cultural centre along with the spaces around it. Originally designed by architects Max Edrei, Garo Balian, and Victor Salama in 1932, the cinema and its interior spaces were used for exhibitions.
In the foyer, visual story teller and portrait photographers Ahmed Hayman and Aisha Al-Shabrawy exhibited “Seasons of Us”. The special captures of portraits of Egyptian actors who played this season’s TV drama echoed emotion, conflict and longing. The posters go beyond promoting for the TV series, they convey promise for an attractive and good watch. Portraits from Gawla Akhira and Ekhwati series were among those beautifully captured shots.
The Radio corridor was truly “A Sense of Place”. It is that space leading to the talk hall and exhibition galleries and camera and printing market, “The Hanger”, “The Factory” and “The Garage”.
Walls of the corridor were decorated with oversize fashion shots taken by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Vincent Van de Wijngaard, who visited Egypt in 2023 along with Egyptian-Moroccan model Imaan Hammam.
Van de Wijngaard believes that there’s always something new to be seen in Cairo. He had shot a series of fashion photographs for a US magazine, on the Pyramids Plateau, in Downtown Cairo, and in the Egyptian Desert.
Preparations for the photo week started six months ago, said Photopia co-founder Marwa Abou Leila. “My worries were mostly economic, as the number of people who are keen to get educated in photography is decreasing. Only professionals really think about it,” she told Al-Ahram Weekly. The industry is not attracting newcomers, and some are even leaving because of the rising prices of professional equipment, she added.
EXHIBITIONS: The unstable political and economic situation over the past few years had brought the “Unsettled” WPP archival exhibition to this year’s Cairo Photo Week.
Migration and forced displacement rank high among the most significant issues facing the world today, and images relating to such stories of migrants, displaced people, and refugees were up on the walls of The Garage space.
Captions are important in photojournalism to avoid disinformation, as mentioned by the WPP exhibition. Not only that, but reading them is as important. On my second round of the exhibition, I realised that 15-year-old Eva taken by Polish photojournalist Tomek Kaczor was Armenian. The information shocked me since she looked much older.
Woken from a catatonic state, Eva is shown in a wheelchair in a refugee reception centre in Podkowa Lesna in Poland. The photograph was taken in 2019 and won first prize in the 2020 Single Portraits category. Eva was trying to seek asylum in Sweden with her family, but they were deported to Poland instead, fearing that they would be sent back to Armenia.
On my second visit to the same exhibition, I found another story with an Armenian background in which Russian photographer of Sputnik Valery Melnikov had captured the stories of the last Armenians to leave their land after the Nagorno Karabakh-Azerbaijan war erupted in September 2020. Melnikov’s story won first prize in the General News Stories category in 2021.
The genocide of the people of Gaza was shown by four Palestinian photojournalists at The Hanger in an exhibition titled “Through Their Lens: Gaza’s Untold Stories.” Belal Khaled’s photograph “The Last Touch” tell the story of a father in Khan Younis who had gone to buy biscuits for his son only to come back and find him killed. The image shows the devastated father holding his son’s foot for the last time.
A banner with the names of 210 photojournalists killed during the war on Gaza was hang on the space’s wall, in remembrance.
“Everyone’s a Photographer until Manual Mode” was a phrase printed on the tote bags given to the participants at the photo week. “People should acquire a good knowledge of photography and the proper practice of it, be it the basics, the exposure triangle, or everything that leads to preparing a good image of your own,” Abou Leila elaborated.
Internationally famous photographer the late Yasser Alwan, or “the dinosaur” as his family and friends used to call him, was also remembered at the event, where tribute was paid to him in an exhibition curated by his student and family friend Nadia Mounier. Alwan, who was born in Nigeria in 1964 to Iraqi parents, moved to Cairo in the 1990s and used analogue cameras to capture intimate photographs in and around the city.
He interacted with Egyptian people in the streets, cafes, and workplaces. All the photographs displayed at The Factory and in the open air were black and white, already in the printed forms made available by his family. The four themes covered scenes from horse-racing at the Gezira Club, mostly showing human expressions of those making bets, labour, the Cairo streets, and “family and friends,” which Monier considered the closest to her heart.
The beautifully taken street portraits were mounted on lightboxes and displayed on Nabarawy Street on the way to the exhibition hall. Each tells the story of a resilient and sometimes also a poor or disappointed citizen. But dignity is always shown. Alwan also portrayed children celebrating the Eid. One that struck me was of a traffic police man making eye contact with the photographer, that said a lot.
MUSICAL MEMORIES: Next stop was a nostalgic juke box, as I called it, originally named “The Music Box,” an exhibition that archived Middle East identity through songs, sounds, images, cassette tapes, posters, magazines, studio portraits, and the whole atmosphere from the 1950s to the 1990s and beyond.
My lucky musical moments came when I stepped into the first space covering music from the 1950s to the 1970s as well as cinematography, and encountered “Egyptian nightingale” Abdel-Halim Hafez singing Ya Albi Ya Khali (“Answer me my empty heart”).
The posters decorating the walls belonged to Egyptian cinematographer Mohamed Bakr, while studio portraits of the artists were signatures of Egyptian-Armenian portrait photographer Van Leo. The next music space was full of the sounds of Algerian singer Warda’s song Harramt Ahebbak (“I stopped loving you”). We all have memories linked to special songs and places, and this exhibition was a visual journey through the recent history of Arab music and culture. Visitors could experience memories of the music that had accompanied their lives.
The Access Art Space hosted an exhibition titled “The Fourth Estate” curated by photographer Heba Khamis. It reminded me of that very expression that we used to use to describe print newspapers before the invention of the Internet and mobile phones. It featured photographs by 46 photojournalists covering news from the 1940s until the present. Here too I travelled back into past Egyptian political life in the company of masters of photojournalism like Mohamed Lotfi, Antoun Albert, Emile Karam, Farouk Ibrahim, Hassan Diab, Fathi Hussein, Norbert Schiller, and many others.
During the tour I saw a familiar front page with a photograph on it by Al-Ahram Weekly’s very own photojournalist Randa Shaath who worked for the newspaper from 1993 to 2005. Dating back to May 1994, Shaath’s photograph was of a meeting in Cairo between former president Hosni Mubarak, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian politicians Nabil Shaath and Yasser Arafat, former Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa, and the US secretary of state and Russian foreign minister at the time.
The meeting produced an agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel that led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. The Weekly’s caption described the agreement as “historic.”
Each wall in the gallery represented an Egyptian national or private-sector newspaper and included front pages, local news, art and culture, sports, features, investigations and obituaries of former Egyptian presidents, including back pages. The design of the exhibition allowed visitors to feel that they were browsing a print newspaper as if holding it in their hands.
Cairo Photo Week’s fourth edition was more than just a space for innovation. Instead, it reflected a move to turn photography into a respected and accessible form of expression in Egypt and beyond. Marwa Abou Leila is looking forward to future collaborations with Getty Images, Akhbar Al-Youm newspaper, and Photo Vogue, she said.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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