Publications
Akkasah is developing a series of publications arising from its research activities, its collections, and from its collaborations with other institutions and with scholars and photographers. These publications will focus on the histories and practices of photography in the Middle East and North Africa and also on photography seen from cross-cultural and global perspectives.
Photography from the Middle East: Emerging Histories & New Practices
Edited by Shamoon Zamir & Issam Nasser | (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming)
At a time when there is a substantial interest in photography from nations and cultures outside the United States and Western Europe, histories of the traditions of photography of, and from, the Middle East remain at best piecemeal. Scholarly interest has focused largely on work of the major Western photographers but not on the work of native practitioners. Such lack of scholarship is not limited to the nineteenth century pioneers but extends to the works of contemporary photographers as well. If this is true of the oeuvres of professional photographers, it is even truer of vernacular or family photography. This collection of essays constitutes an unprecedented gathering in a single volume of many, if not most, of the leading scholars of Middle East photography writing in English, as well as several new voices. What distinguishes the volume is not only this international range of expertise, but also the cultural areas, historical periods and genres covered. The volume will, therefore, offer the first broad overview of the histories and practices of photography in the Middle East through a varied series of individual case studies, essential for both scholars of photography and of Middle Eastern cultures as well as for the informed general reader. The essays gathered in this volume will cover Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Palestine and the Gulf. Together they will explore vernacular traditions, studio practices, family, art, documentary traditions, as well as royal court photography.
Revisiting The Family of Man: Photography in a Global Age
Edited by Gerd Hurm, Anke Reitz & Shamoon Zamir | (London: I.B. Tauris, March 2018)
The Family of Man (1955) is the most widely seen exhibition and the most commercially successful photobook in the history of photography. Five-hundred and three images were gathered from sixty-eight countries and staged through a radically interactive design. Conceived, curated and designed by Edward Steichen in the early years of the Cold War, the exhibition affirmed a common human identity and fate against the continuing political and cultural divisions that were among the legacies of the Second World War. After opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the exhibition toured the world, and it was eventually seen by nearly ten million people in close to forty countries. The book of the exhibition was similarly successful: still in print, it has sold several million copies. The popular response to The Family of Man indicates that the exhibition did cultural work that people found relevant on an unprecedented scale in the postwar world. In stark contrast, the critical response has largely characterized Steichen’s project as historically, politically and aesthetically naïve, and as emotionally immature; critics have also seen it as an exercise in Cold War propaganda. The essays collected in the present volume try to retrieve and to understand anew the sense of cultural and social urgency, what one might call the crisis content, that drove both Steichen’s project and the global audience’s response to it. They do so by exploring new cultural contexts for the exhibition and by undertaking new and detailed formal and conceptual analyses of it.
Egypt Every Day
Yasser Alwan | Edited and Texts by Shamoon Zamir | (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, November 2022)
Yasser Alwan photographed in and around Cairo, recording encounters with people in the streets, at the racetrack, in cafes, and in places of work—tanneries, quarries, bookshops, or potteries. His portraits of workers living in conditions of unimaginable poverty and political dispossession are remarkable for their refusal of the clichés of social documentary and photojournalism. They show people between anger, pride, and perseverance, yet convey a sense of trust toward the photographer. Complementary to his intimate images of friends and family form a collective portrait of the middle class seen in the relaxed informalities of daily life. This collection of Alwan’s photographs offers an unprecedented and unique picture of Egyptian society, introducing an outstanding body of work in contemporary photography from the Arab world.
YASSER ALWAN (*1964, Lagos – 2022, Cairo) was born in Nigeria to Iraqi parents. He studied and worked in Lebanon, Iraq, the United States, Sudan, and Jordan before moving to Egypt in 1993. He taught photography at various institutions, including the German University in Cairo. His photographs have been exhibited internationally.
