When Yasser Alwan, the son of Iraqi diplomats who grew up in the USA, exhibited for the first time in Cairo, the city he loved so much and whose inhabitants he portrayed on camera, there was great outrage. He was told in 2000 that he was making the Egyptians look bad and that he was photographing “the wrong people”.
This is how the historian Shamoon Zamir describes it in the accompanying text to the volume “Egypt Every Day”, on which he had already started working with Yasser Alwan before his death in July 2022. From the thousands of photos that Alwan had taken on the streets of Cairo over the years, the two of them chose not only a few shots of members of the middle class, but above all photos of those who are visible because they don’t work behind shop windows or office walls, but on the street or in open workshops. Photos of cobblers and carpenters, balloon sellers and knife sharpeners. Garbage collectors, traffic cops and market women.
Yasser Alwan: Egypt every day. Ed. Shamoon Zamir. Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2022. 120 pages, 34 euros.
(Photo: Hatje Cantz (SZ))
Many of the black-and-white images show just how badly poverty and the consequences of physical labor can etch themselves into people’s faces. Alwan’s works never appear voyeuristic – even if they show much more of Egypt than the makers of glossy brochures for tourism advertising would like.