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Self-Published, 2015.
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In the Shadow of the Pyramids
Reviewed by Colin Pantall
Text and photographs by Laura El-Tantawy
Self-Published, Amsterdam. 440 pp., 125 illustrations, 9x7x1½".
“There are 90 million people in this
country. Ninety million stories to be told. This is the beginning of only one.”
The country is Egypt, the year is 2011 and the
Arab Spring is in full flight. Cairo’s Tahrir Square is packed with protestors
against the president’s rule and El-Tantawy is in their midst. “In the square
of Liberation I found dreamers. Just like in the films. Thousands of them. In
Tahrir Square I found myself again.”
If the protestors are dreamers (in more
than one sense), that is how the book plays out; like a color-saturated,
grain-soaked, ISO-high dream. It’s dreamland all the way as the subdued fearfulness
and paranoia of the early images explodes into the cathartic adrenalin rush of
the massed crowds in Tahrir Square. They stand in the ranks, flags and banners
aloft and fireworks blasting.
But even here, there is suspicion and
distrust. People know they are being watched, fear is present, spies are
everywhere and new schisms are being formed as the old ones are broken down.
This is no peaceful revolution even when bullets aren’t being fired and rocks
aren’t being thrown. It’s one where familiar forms of violence and oppression
are biding their time beyond the short term, seeking new divisions in which to
find an outlet; the uniform or the religion or the party may change but the
violence and the power remain the same.
There are people in these crowds who know
this. That’s what El-Tantawy picks out, the quiet moments of faces amid the
frenzy, and that’s what makes the book stand out as a very special book. It’s a
triple edit; the before, the now, and the after, an edit made in the full light
of what was to come; the old dictator becoming a new dictator, the oppression
shape-shifting into suits and fatigues,
into the subsequent killing and torture that never fit into anything as neat
and tidy sounding as the Arab Spring.
In the Shadow of the Pyramids is a
visualisation of a mentality, a picture of a repressive state of mind and what
happens when that is manifested through violence and armed force. In the book,
the dream becomes a nightmare and the square becomes darker. Barbed wire and
shields and barriers are photographed or created by El-Tantawy through her
off-kilter framing and use of foregrounds to form visual keyholes. Figures
stand ominously in windows and then ranks of police appear on the scene against
a backdrop of orange and red.
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| In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015. |
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| In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015. |
The faces of the protestors are isolated
now. We see their anger and their tears. These are men and women who are
shocked by what they have witnessed, as El-Tantawy is shocked by what she has
witnessed. “I canvas the square looking for faces that express this revolution,”
she writes. “Hope, fear, disappointment, joy, pride. This square has seen it
all. I ache when they ache. Cry when they cry. Try to laugh when they try. In
their faces I see my own.”
She sees her first body on July 27th
2013. It’s something she doesn’t want to be in this story, in a place that she
realizes is no longer home. And then things get concrete with a picture of a
pool of blood against a line of police shields and suspicion, separation and
fear reigns again. A portrait of Reda, a blind weeping boy, crystallizes that
fear and then we’re finished and it’s “over.” The book ends with “normality,”
with the pyramids and a couple sitting under a tree. Everything is back the way
it was, but what kind of a way is that? On the surface things are normal, but
what lies beneath this surface? What is oppressed? What aren’t people saying or
showing or feeling?
The phenomenal thing about El-Tantawy’s
book is that she captures this subconscious dream-life of a nation where fear
and distrust form the basis of everyday life. She tells the story of Tahrir
Square but she also visualises a way of thinking and how that affects both
herself and a people. And indeed all of us, because In the Shadow of the
Pyramids shows what it feels like to live in a place where you’re not free to say
what you think or to be who you are. Wherever we live corporate, political,
communal, racial, religious or military violence is never too far from the
surface. Including in the United States and where I live, in the United
Kingdom. Tahrir Square could be anywhere.
This book is out of print
COLIN PANTALL is a UK-based writer and photographer. He is a contributing writer for the British Journal of Photography and a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. http://colinpantall.blogspot.com
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