Photography Of / Photography In - Catalogue essay by Menna Hassan Khalil
Photography Of
Why do we still conflate Egypt with ‘the Orient’? For centuries, the vast wealth and strategic importance of Egypt have magnetically attracted colonizers, scientists, migrants, explorers. But the idea of Egypt has been supercharged by something more, something less quantifiable: the allure of ‘the Orient’.
Consider the images. For many visitors and some artists, the idea of Egypt summons a variety of iconic images: the Nile River and its surrounding valleys, the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx set in a vast desert landscape, and the ruins of grand palaces and temples.
Consider the photographs. They are documents and postcards of archaeological heritage, as seeming guarantors of Egypt’s historical grandeur. They act as artefacts of the past, indexes of the present archive, and promissory notes for what visitors can expect to encounter when they come. They root Egypt in ‘the Orient’. Egypt, the Orientalist fantasy, was documented and made known through photographs, as it was through books and paintings. But photographs carried the authority of veracity, however much they didn’t deserve to. Early photographers presented the monuments as objects in the Orient and commemorated scenes from their encounters with them as fixed signs of heritage. Even portraits that featured local people presented them as figures of traditions past. This photographic archive of a timeless Egypt that is in ruins still nourishes our collective imagination and understanding. Less known is another significant practice: photography as a revolutionizing medium.
The early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of local studios and mobile photography in Egypt, which allowed Egyptians to make their own self- image. Vernacular photography rose to the fore with families going annually to their local studios to have their portraits taken. Studio photography ritualized a modern family tradition in which pose, posture, makeup, and setting were elements in the construction of identity. Through this intimate ritual, these Egyptians developed a relationship with the camera and their local photographer that enabled their sense of self to appear in the image. It is in the spirit of this ritualized and personalized photographic tradition that Iverson finds inspiration for The Tour. He draws on the approaches and techniques of the old studios to challenge the photographic archive of/in the Orient.
The Tour grapples with the question of contested identity through images that deal with tensions between the grand myth of ‘the Orient’ and the personal myth of ‘me’ or ‘us.’ Not only do these works of art challenge the historical fixity lent to Egyptian heritage or undying Orientalist visions, they also consider what brings and connects people to the region. Iverson removes his sitters from their time and normal contexts, plotting them onto persistent archaeological terrains that re-locate them in history. Thus, The Tour invites us to locate ourselves in a history that is more complex, more convincing, more helpful than many by which Egypt is known or we are known to ourselves.
Photography In
In this light, Iverson’s photography captures the interplay between past visions, historical memory, and contemporary encounters of everyday spaces of Egypt and elsewhere in the Orient. In his ‘present’ images, history is presented or made present, and as Iverson cuts figures out of spaces and times and pastes them into others, he lends a constant presence to history. His photography manipulates documentary and the facts of documentation that we have taken for granted as fixed truths with fiction, as if to unsettle our misconceptions of other spaces, locales, and cultures. His subjects are deliberate and daring, often staring right at the camera and imposing their presence in and ownership of these settings with their entire longstanding heritage.
But more importantly for Iverson and his fictive characters, it is the ways the Orient has been sensationalized, clichéd, even commercialized that has compelled their intervention. Almost kitsch like in design and affect, Iverson renders place and our experience of it questionable and possible across time in The Tour. Imaginary scenes seem to humorously disrupt and occupy these historical atmospheres, which are otherwise riddled with stillness or deterioration. In almost but not quite surrealist fashion, Iverson gives his figures and viewers visions that are superior to reality. It is as though Iverson is offering a new sense of truth where fact is irrelevant, but perspective is constantly challenged by our encounter, engagement, and experience of it. In his images, historical places become superior to their reality as forgotten, abandoned, aged, or in ruination, and figures superior to their corporeality, their real environments in real time. Time is at once being summoned while deemed unspecific and irrelevant, submitting itself to enduring historical space as constantly present and every changing through the mode of travel and the medium of photography.
Deploying old studio techniques of careful staging and montaging, Iverson gives a puzzle like effect to his images: why does space seem to be chosen over time, even if the times of past figures and places are deliberately taken up and cited, disrupted, even mocked? Giving us a space travel in time, it is as though each image, with every figure in it playing host, is an invitation for viewers to reimagine Egypt/the Orient, literally revisit the past (its figures, places, settings, relics, dreams, memories, souvenirs). Trying to capture this openness in time while insisting on these haunting historical places as part of our present, Iverson gives us a circular sense of time where scale and reflection are irrelevant, but memory and desire are obligating. It is through this play on time and space that Iverson succeeds in creating an uncanny aura of past-ness or past life that is all about possibility and presence. Within these fantastical landscapes, montaged figures are not only imposing the desire and possibility for their own belonging in different settings, they are salvaging historical ruins with the present as a constant that they haunt and reclaim. In the style of the old studios, the men and women of past times are costumed and staged for the camera’s eye with a new focus to show us the making of alternate realities and how these subjects are entitled to them. As they tour, roles and gazes are reversed, visitations and cultures are exchanged to question old realities and fabricate new ones.
The Tour is a tour de force that pushes us to reconsider our knowledge and experience of history and place.
Menna Hassan Khalil Cairo, 18 June, 2019
Menna Hassan Khalil is an academic and multimedia artist living and working between Egypt and the United States. She has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago, specializing in the impact of social phenomena on collective imaginaries and ways of life.