Andrea Gnam
The "Plate" Memory: A Journey to Egypt. 1997

Introduction accompanying the publication in "transversale.org",
October 2006
"Everyone can testify to the fact that the length of time we are exposed to impressions has no impact on their fate within our memory. Nothing prevents us from retaining rooms where we spent twenty-four hours clearly in our memory and then completely forgetting others where we spent months. Not always is too short an exposure time at fault, when an image fails to appear on the plate of memory," writes Walter Benjamin on the peculiarities of memory in "A Berlin Chronicle," a preliminary work to his memoirs, Berlin Childhood around 1900. The vanished memory of spaces of the past can be manifested in the flash of an eye "within the image of a snapshot," if the plate is exposed "one
day by an outside source, as if made of ignited magnesium powder." "We, however, are always at the center of these strange images." Benjamin’s image of the plate camera, through which he describes the strange latency and appearance of images in the process of memory (the photographic plate acting as a modern metaphor that replaces Plato’s comparison of memory to a board of wax) comes to the fore through the mechanisms of the medium itself in a volume of photographs by the German-Egyptian photographer Amin El Dib.

El Dib, who spent his early childhood with his Egyptian father and German mother in Egypt and then moved with his family to Germany, visits the historic sites of ancient Egypt with his wife and daughter. He senses a proximity to these locations, but they are still removed, as he does not speak the language and is visiting contemporary Egypt as a German tourist—bringing his previous knowledge from his youth with him. The "plate" of memory harbors something familiar that, to a certain extent, is situated in a blurred realm. Amin El Dib selected the travel photography of the 19th century as a cultural repertoire of images to accompany him on his photographic journey. The travel photographer was indeed able to show things with the large-format camera, which the naked eye was incapable of seeing.

Like Walter Benjamin, who selected a number of guides for his retrospective journey into his Berlin childhood, Amin El Dib has an additional guide at his side: his daughter who at the time of the trip is a old as he was when he spent time at the sites now revisited.

The order of the black-and-white photographs in the book alternately places large and small formats as well as a summoning and release of memory next to each other. They show the child in front of building structures, the scale of which is oversized even for an adult, in the way the images of memory generally recall the spaces of childhood. When one encounters the expansive sites of childhood again years later, they seem oddly constricted. With the pyramids, an adult is spared this disappointment, and the flow of time passed is not interrupted by a subjective experience of shrunken space. Looking back into the past accrues a specific signature through the aesthetic play of the
photographer with the history of the given medium and his daughter as a guide through time. The events seem at once both familiar and disconnected from reality – as if one is examining a series of stereoscopic images from the early age of photography.

What there is to see in El Dib’s photographs invites the viewer to take a look and take their time. The book is dedicated to his wife and child, who are shown wearing imaginative travel outfits with wide straw hats in a small photo. A corner of the photograph has been torn away, as if the image only mattered to survive the wear of time by chance. On the opposite page is a larger format view of the temple of Luxor. In this photograph the segment of uniform grey sky framed by the beams of the ruins and two columns corresponds to the missing segment of the family photograph. Next to a view into the Valley of the Kings—the daughter, slightly lost, stands in the foreground and turns to her father behind the camera as if to call something out to him—is the image of a clean hotel complex. Here the child is splashing around in the swimming pool on a plastic crocodile. In another scene the child looks down from the window of a minaret onto a lively Cairo street scene. Her blurry silhouette can be seen in the foreground, and her head calls to mind an antique statue. She seems to have just pulled back a curtain to reveal the scenery—the gaze of the viewer falling on the watch at her wrist.

Andrea Gnam, 2006

Amin El Dib: Eine Reise nach Ägypten (A Journey to Egypt) 1997.
ex pose verlag Hansgert Lambers Berlin 2002