As part of the Downtown Contemporary Art Festival, I joined a street photography workshop with the Great Photographer and artist Fathi Hawas. It happened in Shawarby Street in Downtown Cairo.
An eye opening experience for me... Hawas talked about photography as a way of performance art. He visualized a film screening documenting photographers and how they capture their photographs. He said photographers are just like any performer or actor, they perform their role. They need to cut through the crowd, step up a stool, race and sometimes become clowns and interact with the people to capture the right shot. What you do behind the camera affects what kind of shot you take, therefore this makes you a performer.
we are all performers performing our roles in life...just like those disabled people on the wheel chairs. As part of the workshop we were focusing more on documenting what was happening around the area, so I decided to focus on some of the DCAF performers. I decided to look through my lens for forms, rhythms and movements and let that be my goal for the day.
Most of the street performances dealt with the idea of disability and the obstacles those people face through their life and the limitations they come across.
Disability is performance art...
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If this city would talk you probably wouldn't hear it but you would feel it.... The rhythm and the movement of the people...the wrinkles, the roughness of noise, the burst and the density of the crowd...all come together to form a picture and a frame.
The Crowd is diverse and multicultural...from every creed and nation. Downtown is the centre...the centre of the heart and the centre of the universe... timeless...people phasing in and out of life...
