Mirit Agaiby
Commercial Security: A Myth
Egypt is rapidly becoming privatized as the areas where the public is freely allowed to occupy without any rules are slowly coming to extinction. Anywhere people go in Egypt there are rules, in the streets, in gardens, and especially in malls.
When commercial centers prohibit people from photographing “with professional equipment” under the pretense of “security” something must seem suspicious. What are those ‘security measures’ they claim? Who has the right to them, and who does not? Do they really protect everyone, or just specific people? One begins to wonder what secrets would these commercial centers like to hide, that “professional photographic equipment” are not allowed to capture, even if the person holding these equipment is an amateur using them for non-commercial, personal reasons. Where one would expect that post-Arab Spring there would generally be a more openness in the country, it turns out that it has now tighter security. This is merely a sign of the revolution’s legacy in Egypt, the secrecy, the determination to be better at hiding this time, the general look at a journalist’s life in Egypt, something resembling this. Having to constantly be undercover, and resort to lies in order to capture the truth, a problem that went unfixed the first time around.
This project aims to demonstrate that the photographs in it were taken undercover, because photography in that commercial center they were taken at was prohibited. These images are mostly abstract, or in any case they do not exhibit any distinctive trait of any specific person, yet nevertheless it was hard to obtain them. The main issue at hand, is why such photographs were problematic to take? Why was a person denied the permission to photograph even when they applied for a permit, while attempting to explain that in no way were those images for a commercial reason, but merely under a creative license?
Commercial Security: A Myth
Egypt is rapidly becoming privatized as the areas where the public is freely allowed to occupy without any rules are slowly coming to extinction. Anywhere people go in Egypt there are rules, in the streets, in gardens, and especially in malls.
When commercial centers prohibit people from photographing “with professional equipment” under the pretense of “security” something must seem suspicious. What are those ‘security measures’ they claim? Who has the right to them, and who does not? Do they really protect everyone, or just specific people? One begins to wonder what secrets would these commercial centers like to hide, that “professional photographic equipment” are not allowed to capture, even if the person holding these equipment is an amateur using them for non-commercial, personal reasons. Where one would expect that post-Arab Spring there would generally be a more openness in the country, it turns out that it has now tighter security. This is merely a sign of the revolution’s legacy in Egypt, the secrecy, the determination to be better at hiding this time, the general look at a journalist’s life in Egypt, something resembling this. Having to constantly be undercover, and resort to lies in order to capture the truth, a problem that went unfixed the first time around.
This project aims to demonstrate that the photographs in it were taken undercover, because photography in that commercial center they were taken at was prohibited. These images are mostly abstract, or in any case they do not exhibit any distinctive trait of any specific person, yet nevertheless it was hard to obtain them. The main issue at hand, is why such photographs were problematic to take? Why was a person denied the permission to photograph even when they applied for a permit, while attempting to explain that in no way were those images for a commercial reason, but merely under a creative license?