NYTimes: Moises Saman's Egypt's Choice

Presidential election fever has been gripping Egypt for months, and it'll perhaps come to a conclusion in the coming few days...or in another few weeks, if a runoff is the case.Along with many millions of Egyptians, I couldn't believe my eyes when watching the first ever presidential debate in the Middle East took place earlier this month. Yes, it was flawed...yes, the two frontrunners went overboard in hyperbole and off topic attacks one each other... but nowhere else in the Arab world, has such a spectacle ever been seen before.Yes, Egypt's political transition has been farcical, messy, bizarre, chaotic, violent, unpredictable, and serious,...

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18 Days In Egypt

A power struggle of epic proportions between various political factions is currently underway in Egypt...essentially a troika of conflicting interests, the power struggle is manifesting itself overtly and covertly. Overtly, the battle for power is over the presidency, and is between the Muslim Brotherhood, (a comparatively pragmatic Islamic movement) the Salafists (a regressive Islamist faction), and the military establishment. The secular forces seem to have been marginalized, even though it was its youth who sparked and carried through the revolution in 2011.That said, it's not over till the fat lady sings...and there will be more twists and turns to this story as it enfolds over the days and weeks to come.I thought the 18DaysIn Egypt documentary being worked on by filmmaker...

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A Year Ago...Egypt

Photo  Ed Ou - All Rights Reserved In remembrance of those who fell in Tahrir and elsewhere. The Egyptian revolution started a year ago today, and is still ongoing. And to the naysayers, neo-cons and the rest of the mindless individuals who prefer Arab dictatorships, and see democracy (as imperfect as it may be) taking its first steps in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East as an existentialist threat, go screw yourselves. And to those who are optimistic, here are, via Foreign Policy Magazine, the young Egyptians who will eventually succeed in achieving what they starte...

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Ed Ou: The Egyptian Youth

Photo  Ed Ou-All Rights Reserved The news that "Islamists" seem to have won a majority in Egypt's first Parliament since the ouster of Mubarak is being reported by the US media in disquieting vocabulary, especially since it came at the expense of the liberal parties and youth activists who set off the revolution.  Many secular Egyptians are expressing alarm and anxiety at the result of the initial round of Parliamentary elections, while others shrug off these results by predicting that the Muslim Brotherhood (as one of the factions described as Islamists) may well have a majority, but will either choose or be forced to exert...

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POV: Moises Saman And Cairo Undone

Photo  Moises Saman-All Rights Reserved   How wrong I was! I always dismissed the idea of photographing street life in Cairo by saying that there was nothing to photograph there...not much color, no vibrancy....but that began to change after the January Revolution. Was it a subconscious rejection of the then-prevailing environment? Or simply because I was blase about photographing in my own backyard...albeit one that I left for more than 30 years? Was it both? Perhaps. That admission being made, I have to clarify that I speak only of street life rather than particular cultural subject matters, such as documenting Sufi...

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Global Post: Egypt's Women Of Revolution

Photo  Elizabeth D. Herman-All Rights Reserved While I'm here in Siem Reap, I am following the events in Cairo with mixed feelings...feelings of pride and anxiety. The outcome of the 'rebooted' Egyptian revolution is impossible to predict, but some pundits have describe the current events in Tahrir Square as Egyptians trying to reclaim their January 25 revolution from the military. There are a number of recent photo essays from Tahrir Square, but I thought I'd feature the work of Global Post's Elizabeth D. Herman titled Egypt: Women of the Revolution. This is a compelling gallery of 18 photographs along with captions that tell us...

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The Revolution Thru The Lens of Fady Ezzet, An Egyptian Photojournalist

I've featured the work of young Egyptian photojournalists working for the local newspapers, who not only documented the Tahrir uprisings, but who also participated in the revolution. For why I'm doing this, you can read my earlier post The Revolution...This Time Through The Lenses Of Home-Grown Egyptian Photojournalists. This is the fourth and last part in the series, and is the work of Fady Ezzet, an Egyptian photojournalist who also works for El Shorouk Newspaper. He graduated from Cairo University, and is a full time photojournalist.Having followed the series, I noticed that Fady's images are more in the thick of violence than the others. I presume being a male allowed him to take more risks than the other three women.For each slideshow in the series, I chose the popular "Enta Omri"...

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The Revolution Thru The Lens of Lobna Tarek, An Egyptian Photojournalist

I've started to feature the work of young Egyptian photojournalists working for the local newspapers, who not only documented the Tahrir uprisings, but who also participated in the revolution. For why I'm doing this, you can read my earlier post The Revolution...This Time Through The Lenses Of Home-Grown Egyptian Photojournalists. This is the third part in the series, and is the work of Lobna Tarek, an Egyptian photojournalist who just started to work for El Shorouk Newspaper a few months ago. She holds a degree in Communications from Cairo University, and at just 22 has taken up photojournalism as a full time career.Imagine having just joined the profession and being plunged in a historic and momentous event within weeks of starting her career!For each slideshow in the series, I chose...

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The Revolution...This Time Through The Lenses Of Home-Grown Egyptian Photojournalists

Photo  Eman Helal-All Rights Reserved Since the recent effort by BagNews's Assignment Egypt (Analyzing News Photo From the 18 Days Revolution) wasn't about featuring the work of Egyptian photojournalists, I thought I'd solicit submissions from young home-grown Egyptian photojournalists working for the local newspapers, who not only documented the Tahrir uprisings, but who also participated in the revolution...in their revolution, for this blog instead. These photojournalists are far from being "khawagas" (a colloquial nickname for non-Egyptians), they are not well-known in the Western media, they are -to borrow a word from the US...

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POV: Analyzing Photos of The Egyptian Revolution

First, let me share this anecdote from the 2010 Istanbul Foundry Photojournalism Workshop. Mohammed "Mikko" Hassan, the late young Egyptian photojournalist, told me he had to borrow a lens from a friend so he could produce the kind of imagery expected of him at the workshop. Yes, young photojournalists in Egypt who work for local newspapers have to share lenses when covering assignments because they can't afford to have their own. This is not unheard of amongst non-Western photographers. I remembered Mikko's words when I saw BagNews Salon was hosting an online panel this coming Sunday to discuss the medias visual framing of Egypt's revolution....

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POV: Analyzing Photos of The Egyptian Revolution

First, let me share this anecdote from the 2010 Istanbul Foundry Photojournalism Workshop. Mohammed "Mikko" Hassan, the late young Egyptian photojournalist, told me he had to borrow a lens from a friend so he could produce the kind of imagery expected of him at the workshop. Yes, young photojournalists in Egypt who work for local newspapers have to share lenses when covering assignments because they can't afford to have their own. This is not unheard of amongst non-Western photographers. I remembered Mikko's words when I saw BagNews Salon was hosting an online panel this coming Sunday to discuss the medias visual framing of Egypt's revolution....

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TIME Magazine: Egyptian Youth

It's not often that I'm in agreement with TIME magazine's cover choices, but I am with this one. The photograph is of Egyptian activists in Cairo who made history, and is by Finlay MacKay, a Scottish photographer.The uprisings in the Arab Middle East are defining moments for the youth of these countries...while some mistaken pundits in the West are still trying to define the uprisings as having Islamic (or even Islamist) connotations, these are the same old tired cliches we've heard over and over again since September 11, 2001. These are the faces of Egypt...look at them carefully. These are its futu...

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POV: Missed Opportunity?

Photo  MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images (Via denverpost.com) As readers of this blog know, my In Search of Sufis of Gujarat Photo-Expedition coincided almost perfectly with the revolution in Egypt, and I was torn between my commitment to its participants to continue leading it as if nothing was happening in my homeland...and flying off to Cairo and cover the events as best I could. I stayed on. It was a difficult decision and certainly a missed opportunity to get involved in Egypt's historic moments, but I had a commitment to the group of photographers who chose to accompany me on this trip. Had I sensed that I needed to be there because...

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Egypt Is Free

Photo  Ed Ou For The New York Times Egypt Is Free! is the headline in the Indian newspapers here in Ahmedabad...and what a welcome sight it is after two weeks of non stop traveling in Gujarat on the In Search of Sufis Photo~Expedition. Infrequent internet connections, and non existent English news channels on hotels' television meant that detailed news of the historic events in Cairo were sparse. It's with jubilation that I learned of Mubarak's resignation and the fall of his regime...but as importantly, I'm ecstatic the young Egyptians have more than regained their pride, and their place in history. As many have said, this is a historic...

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A New Dawn In Egypt?

Photo  Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters It's surreal to be at the cusp of starting on a photo~expedition while my country of origin is experiencing an unprecedented massive popular uprising to get rid of the current regime of Mubarak, the Egyptian president....who announced that he would remain as its leader but sack its government. There are a number of thoughts that come to mind. This is a real organic grassroots popular uprising in Egypt against an extremely unpopular and corrupt regime. The Egyptians participating in the uprising are secular, young, educated and less so, and are technological-savvy. There are no signs of religious ideology,...

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The Coptic Man on "Tiananmen Square"?

Photo  Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters A photograph by Amr Abdallah Dalsh, a Reuters photographer, stopped me in my tracks. It shows an Egyptian young man (presumably a Christian Copt) menacing or hurling a piece of iron at the cowering Egyptian police. This came about as a consequence of the heinous bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria on New Year's Eve which killed 23 and injured 100. Egypt is still reeling from the violence, and its government has quickly blamed external Islamist terrorism, promising to bring the perpetrators to justice.  I'm not holding my breath on that eventuality, and neither are the Copts, who have been...

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NPR: Cairo And The "Disconnected"

This touches on photography/multimedia only tangentially, so unless you're into Middle Eastern-international politics, you may want to skip all the stuff below and just click on the movie.A number of media outlets are gingerly covering Egypt's political scene due to the imminent parliamentary elections. I say gingerly because Egypt is a so-called major ally in the "war against terror" or whatever it's called these days, so it wouldn't be politic or in our national "interests" to criticize its ossified and corrupt regime. Why the United States aligns itself with despots in the Middle East and elsewhere will always be an anachronism.NPR has featured a number of short articles and some multimedia for the occasion, and I found this one titled In Cairo Slum, Little Hope For Change to be an exemplar...

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Mohamed Hassan: Photojournalist

Photo  Mohamed Hassan- All Rights Reserved Mohamed Hassan Abd El Aal (Mikko Hassan) lived and worked in Cairo, and graduated from the Akhbar El-Yom Academy with an honor degree in Journalism. He worked as a press photographer in the daily newspaper El-Shorouk El Gedid. Apart from covering political issues, protests and demonstrations, he was interested in documenting the traditional manufacturing processes in Old Cairo. One of these features gleaned him first prize in the 2009 Annual Press Photography Competition of Egypt. I met Mohamed (aka Mikko) at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul. He wasn't in my class, but approached...

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Masr: Javier Morgade

Masr is the Arabic word for Egypt...and it's also colloquially used for Cairo. So in Arabic, Egyptians are called Masr'yeen...which is confusing for non-Arabic speakers, but that's how it is. Egypt was borrowed from the Latin Aegyptus and from the ancient Greek Agyptos. Javier Morgade was filming in Egypt for an airline company, and was left with surplus footage for this short movie. It's a documentary made with a Canon 5d Mark II and a Glidetrack HD. It was edited in Final Cut Pro and graded with After Effects. The song is by a contemporary Egyptian singer and is titled ah men al forak, which loosely translated means "lamenting separation". In my view (and I should know), Javier managed to capture in this short movie the essence of the Egyptian character, the kindness, humor, hospitality...

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David Myers: City of The Dead

The City of the Dead is produced by David Myers, a part-time photographer who lives in Maryland and works in Washington DC.The City of the Dead is a four mile long cemetery (a necropolis would be a better word to describe it) which extends from the northern to southern part of Cairo. It's called el-arafa by Egyptians, and is an area of tombs and mausoleums where people live and works amongst the dead. Its foundation dates back to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642 AD, and has grown with time until it reached the equivalent of a fully functioning residential suburb of Cairo.I watched this short photo essay, and it brought back childhood memories when, once a year during the Eid festival, I had to accompany my father to pay respects to our ancestors and forebears who were interred in our family's...

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