Kairo. Offene Stadt. Neue Bilder einer andauernden Revolution

Background information

"'Cairo. Open City'' examines the roles that images are playing in the ongoing Egyptian revolution, from the outbreak of the Arab Spring through the present. The catalog includes a variety of approaches to the time-based media of photography and video, from the works of photo journalists, to recordings by activists and 'citizen journalists', to documents collected by different artists.  The different chapters will generate a dialogue between the images: Cover images from newspapers will stand alongside photo galleries from blogs, iconic pictures alongside unknown images of people on the streets, images of martyrs alongside long-term documentary projects.
The catalog comes out on the occasion of the exhibition in the Museum for Photography Braunschweig and collects essays from young Cairo-based authors." (© Spector, 2013)

Additional information

"Egyptian artists, photographers, activists and curators were involved in planning the exhibition, which features shots by foreign and Egyptian news agency photographers – the classical protagonists of journalistic coverage – but also a Twitter wall, video portraits of eyewitnesses, video recordings and photos made by activists and ‘civilian journalists’ published on media portals such as Flickr, and documents collected by artists, having been created as means of expressing opinions, influencing the course of events, preserving memories, commemorating victims and bearing testimony. On the one hand, the exhibition sheds light on the omnipresence of digital observation, the livestream of the revolution, and the new forms of dissemination and alternative news reporting by way of communication platforms and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet the show is also concerned with the circulation of these images, their presence in the urban realm, the role they play on banners, magazine covers, graffiti, etc." (from the advertising text for the exhibition)
The deisgn of the book is made by Nicola REITER, Ahmed KAMEL as well as by Andrej LOLL