arab spring

Description

In The Shadow of The Pyramid is Laura El-Tantawy's photography project of Egypt during the Arab Spring. "I am an Egyptian citizen. For the first time in my life I feel hope. The popular revolution of January 25, 2011 revived a long lost sense of pride & dignity for Egyptian people & its implications are reverberating across the Middle East. Over my entire lifetime, I have seen Egyptians living under a dark cloud in the form of a totalitarian regime pressing down against their dignity. Egyptians lost their national pride & unity. Wealth & power rested in the hands of a minority who seemed to be the only ones with the right to live. The masses felt isolated & with this isolation people became foreigners in their own land. In 2005 I began to document the lives of everyday Egyptians. I took pictures of people shopping in the market, families on weekend outings, the first wave of political opposition protests led by the Kefaya "Enough" movement, people living on the fringes of society in burial grounds & others living on the edge of humanity among piles of household waste, hospital discard and dwelling rats. My goal now is to document a new chapter in Egypt's story -- a post-Mubarak Egypt. In December 2011, I will start a roundtrip across the country in search of its new identity. From the capital to the coast and the rural villages to the touristic hubs, I will go to understand what this new Egypt is like. The purpose of my work has & is to identify the essence of being Egyptian during & after the Mubarak era. In doing so I aim to illustrate how events in this strategic North African country & the changes people experience can give insight into future trends across the Middle East." Support the project on emphas.is --http://emphas.is/web/guest/discoverprojects?projectID=324#.To4ShOnccV0.facebook