Amin El Dib
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Accompanying text 1998 |
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| In the fall of 1997 I took a trip to Egypt with my family. This piece was first conceived as an album for my daughter, Helene, which is why I placed her and her mother at the center of the work. The sequence of images traces the progress of the journey.
In this regard, the piece has a private character, which was also enhanced by the memories I had during this trip. As a child and adolescent, in other words at Helene's age, I spent a great deal of time at the places shown, and I was thus placed in the position of seeing myself again through the child. In the past few years I have studied photographs taken in Egypt around the turn of the century, for the most part by travelers. These influences are not difficult to detect. At the same time I have integrated motifs and a certain pictorial language in my approach, which refer to the present. This series shares a certain point of view with the historical photographs that excluded Egyptians from the picture or reduced them to yardsticks indicating the scale of buildings. Different here is the constant reflection within the picture about my own position as a tourist. With some pictures I used a technique, which one could characterize as "exposure jumps". These might call to mind the fissures in old glass negatives. This method also enables me to address an inherent issue of photography within the composition of the image - the different range in contrast between the negative and the positive. I was born in Cairo in 1961. My father is an Egyptian, my mother a German. In 1966 our family moved to Duisburg where I grew up. I have dual citizenship but speak only my mother's tongue. This constellation is also depicted in this work. Amin El Dib |
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