Half Presence half absence
Cairo… half presence, half absence...
I try to see Cairo in color again, but it only returns to me in fragments, never whole. Perhaps that is why I turned to Polaroid, where everything becomes delicate, like memory itself - half present, half absent, fading yet still mine.
These Polaroids are my way of holding Cairo in my hands - soft, fleeting, fragile. Each image is like a memory that is born and dies in the same moment, suspended between staying and disappearance. Once, a friend asked me after seeing part of my work: Is this really Cairo? He asked about the absence of many neighborhoods and areas that have now become part of the city like “6th of October,” “Sheikh Zayed,” and also “Fifth Settlement.” I told him then that the city appearing in my images is a part of me, the one my soul belongs to - the streets of Downtown, Old Cairo, Dokki, Zamalek, Agouza; places that shaped my sense of this place. As for the neighborhoods he mentioned, I simply cannot bear them. For me, they are not part of my Cairo. They are new places, without soul, without memory, carrying none of the emotional weight that makes a place truly a city.
In my childhood, my father often took me to Old Cairo and taught me a great deal about it and its history. When I began moving on my own toward the end of adolescence, trying to discover the city, it was those “old” streets that gave me a sense of belonging. I felt that those streets and those faces were the core of Cairo, from which everything else emerged.
I often returned there before I practiced photography and after I became working full time as a photographer, during times of despair and depression. The movement there gave me a certain strength, a renewed energy that allowed me to continue. But in recent years, every new walk has filled me with sorrow: deliberate neglect, erasure, and disappearance tightening their grip on my Cairo, while the city swells in other directions - new neighborhoods everywhere, marketed as “New Cairo.”
What once seemed solid crumbles day by day.
Polaroid resembles memory itself - unfinished, a brief flash impossible to repeat. It does not capture the place alone, but the feeling of a city that leaves and returns in the same moment. My wandering with a Polaroid camera feels like a project without an end, because Cairo never ends inside me and I may never truly leave it, no matter how far I go or how much I try.
