Egypt has been photographed literally inside out. From the earliest daguerreotypes and calotypes to infra-red, laser, and satellite imagery, every available technique has been pressed into service to feed public and scholarly appetites. No country has exerted such a sustained and universal attraction, nor has a nation’s past so nearly supplanted its present in the collective mind’s eye. Over the course of 170 years, photography has helped shape Egypt’s social and political realities. Its role in archaeology, tourism, and journalism, or as propaganda, commodity, and art, belongs to a uniquely elaborated visual history. Photography and Egypt describes the forces behind photography’s development in this most photographed of places, highlighting the camera’s power to conceal as well as reveal. Histories of photography often discuss Egypt along with the rest of the Middle East, focusing on the nineteenth century, and stopping short of the time when Egyptians were no longer just the subject of photographs, but their authors. This book surveys past and present, placing Egypt and Egyptians in the foreground of a visual legacy of great and largely unexamined breadth. It offers previously unpublished images, information for researchers, curators, and collectors, and pleasure for those who love Egypt and photography.
Photography and Egypt
Maria Golia
192 pp.
80 illus. incl. 30 color
19X22cm
ISBN 9789774163357
For sale only in the Middle East
19.95
Related products
The Churches of Egypt
From the Journey of the Holy Family to the Present Day
Edited by Carolyn LudwigGertrud J.M. van Loon
Gawdat Gabra
Photographs by Sherif Sonbol
With over 300 full-color photographs, this is the first fully illustrated book devoted to Christian houses of worship in Egypt. The text incorporates the latest research to complement the broad geographic scope covering nearly all significant Coptic sites throughout the country, from the ancient Coptic churches in Old Cairo to the churches in the monasteries of Wadi al-Natrun, the Red Sea, and Upper Egypt. Churches associated with the Holy Family’s sojourn in Egypt, including Gabal al-Tayr and Dayr al-Muharraq, enrich the volume. Churches of all other Christian denominations in Egypt are also described and beautifully illustrated here. A number of Greek Orthodox churches, Evangelical Coptic, Catholic, Armenian, and Anglican churches are included. Introductory chapters on the history of Christianity in Egypt, the architecture of the Coptic Church, and Coptic wall paintings help readers to appreciate fully the great cultural, artistic, and architectural heritage of Egypt’s Christians.
...read more
Flexibound
330 pp.350 color illus.
25X30.5cm
35.00
Gardens of Sand
Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, and the Levant
Issam NassarPatricia Almárcegui
Clark Worswick
Between 1859 and 1905, a number of photographers working in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, and northern Africa captured their landscapes, towns, and monuments, bequeathing an unprecedented visual documentation of the Middle East. Gardens of Sand brings together 100 original photographs, masterpieces mostly hitherto unpublished, taken between 1859 and 1905. The archive illustrates the themes of the expatriate photographers of the second half of the nineteenth century—study portraits, royal commissions, landscapes, inventories of significant monuments and buildings, orientalist scenes, steeped in classical European imagination—but also explores the confrontation between western imagination and the visual reality of the Middle East, a meeting that gave rise to a local photography, gradually moving further away from western stereotypes, and includes a critical analysis of orientalism and of photography as a means of conveying a reality of prejudices.
...read more
Hardbound
152 pp.90 illus.
24X28cm
24.95
Hassan Fathy and Continuity in Islamic Arts and Architecture
The Birth of a New Modern
Ahmad HamidHassan Fathy, the Egyptian architect known for his recognition of the potential of vernacular forms as a vital force in contemporary architectural design, sought to integrate the traditions of Islamic art with his modern visions for living. Guided by Fathy’s principles, Ahmad Hamid, an architect who collaborated with Hassan Fathy in the Institute for Appropriate Technology, identifies questions about the nature of Islamic art and its building culture, as well as the origins of modern architecture. This richly illustrated book provides new insights into Hassan Fathy’s profuse, pathbreaking design documents and built projects, while exploring the socioeconomic, environmental, psychological, and esthetic components of Fathy’s work in the light of a quest for a new universal modernity for the twenty-first century.
...read more
Hardbound
224 pp.100 b/w photographs and drawings
19X24cm
29.95
Architecture for the Dead
Cairo’s Medieval Necropolis
Galila El KadiAlain Bonnamy
The great medieval necropolis of Cairo, comprising two main areas that together stretch twelve kilometers from north to south, constitutes a major feature of the city’s urban landscape. With monumental and smaller-scale mausolea dating from all eras since early medieval times, and boasting some of the finest examples of Mamluk architecture not just in the city but in the region, the necropolis is an unparalleled—and until now largely undocumented—architectural treasure trove. In Architecture for the Dead, architect Galila El Kadi and photographer Alain Bonnamy have produced a comprehensive and visually stunning survey of all areas of the necropolis. Through detailed and painstaking research and remarkable photography, in text, maps, plans, and pictures, they describe and illustrate the astonishing variety of architectural styles in the necropolis: from Mamluk to neo-Mamluk via baroque and neo-pharaonic, from the grandest stone buildings with their decorative domes and minarets to the humblest—but elaborately decorated—wooden structures. The book also documents the modern settlement of the necropolis by families creating a space for the living in and among the tombs and architecture for the dead.
...read more
Hardbound
304 pp.320 b/w illus., 105 maps and plans
20X24cm
29.95