Project Description
Cairo Ring Road is a photographic survey which explores questions
of public policy, environmental neglect, heritage, and issues of social
justice in Egypt. The work is an archive of an ongoing social, economic,
environmental, and housing crisis in the years leading to and beyond the
January 25th Revolution of 2011.
There is urgency, more than ever before, with pollution, the building
of desert cities, unsustainable uses of the Nile and agricultural land,
and systemic corruption to rethink land use in a more sustainable and
ecologically responsible way. This urgency inspired me to turn my
camera with an unflinching view to raise awareness and to bear
witness to the brutality that has been perpetrated on the land.
Anthony
Hamboussi
Bac kgr ou n d
Considering the official government image of Cairo and the stereotypical
image of antiquities the city’s image is being whitewashed. Many of the
images in Cairo Ring Road are characterized by erosion, by chaos, neglect,
or dilapidation and reflect a reality of the majority of those living in Cairo
today. My photographs show Cairenes complex ways of occupying urban
space and the strategies used to preserve their survival. I’m trying not to
produce images that are stereotypical, for I don’t see those images as meant
to question or agitate but rather to control, to dominate over others, whether
politically, racially or culturally. I’m interested in a visually charged
portrayal of the class polarization played out in the built environment
and it’s politics. The embrace of the vernacular, the specific, the local
in a world that has otherwise embraced the “generic city.”
Cairo Ring Road takes a sustained look tracking the city’s development.
I’ve tried to visualize the mechanisms as to how Cairo actually functions.
Instead of being immediately seduced as a photographer by spectacular
events and images of public protest, human rights violations, and politics,
the project focuses on the social dissatisfactions that are seeded in the
ordinary landscapes of communities; it’s about documenting the places
and spaces where the basic rights and opportunities for the citizens to
act on their own behalf are being imagined.
Anthony Hamboussi is an Egyptian-American photographer,
born in Brooklyn, NY in 1969. He has exhibited in the
Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, International Center of Photography,
MoMA/PS1, Americas Society, Queens Museum and Sculpture
Center, New York. His book, Newtown Creek: A Photographic
Survey of New York’s Industrial Waterway was published by
Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. He has co-authored
Center for Urban Ecology. Hamboussi has received grants from
the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts,
Jerome Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts
in Architecture, Planning & Design. His photographs have been
published in The New Yorker, Domus Magazine, and The New
York Times, among others.
two books; What is Affordable Housing? with the Center for
Urban Pedagogy and LIC in Context with Place in History.
His collaborations include “Words, Images, and Spaces: A
www.anthonyhamboussi.net
Anthony Hamboussi . Underneath the Sixth of October Bridge, Al Hadaek Hadaeq, Al Qubbah, Cairo Governorate, Cairo Ring Road series . 2014
Language for a New City?” with Kyong Park and International
6 Nueva Luz
Nueva Luz 7