Photography and Egypt
Maria Golia
While the photography of Egypt and its monuments by foreigners has been well-documented, until now comparatively little has been known about the early days of photography among Egyptians themselves. Photography and Egypt redresses the balance: as well as considering images taken by early explorers, for the first time Maria Golia presents a wide range of photography made by Egyptians, of Egyptians, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.
The author examines how photography was employed for propaganda purposes, including depictions of celebrated soldiers, workers and farmers; and how studio-based photography was used to portray the growing Egyptian middle class. Today’s young photographic artists, Golia reveals, use the medium to celebrate everyday life and to indict political and social conditions, with photography bearing witness to history - as well as helping to shape it.
Illustrated with a rich, sometimes surprising variety of images, many published for the first time in the West, Photography and Egypt is the first book to relate the story of Egypt’s rapport with photography in one concise and highly readable account.
Customers in the US, Canada and South America may order the book here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo8364849.html
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About Maria Golia
Reviews for Photography and Egypt
TLS
Golia is a terrific writer, and she brings to Photography and Egypt the same easygoing prose that made her earlier book, Cairo: City of Sand, such a pleasure to read . . . Golia's intense and unyielding affection for the place . . . is balanced by wry humor and an occasionally brutal critique of the censorious nature of the current regime, the paranoia of life under emergency law, and the lethargy perpetuated by a swollen and ineffectual state bureaucracy.
Bidoun
Author and long-term resident, Maria Golia, conjures the real Egypt to life before the reader, and unfolds the development of a vernacular photography, from topography, middle class posturing and propaganda, to political and social activism and bearing witness to contemporary events.
F22 Magazine
An admirable and precise historical analysis and critique of the conditions under which photographs were produced in Egypt, as well as an assessment of their impact on the region.
Catherine David, chief curator, Musées de France