![]() ![]() Thirty years later, his pictures take elegant form in this three-part volume. Gossage’s birds circle above Saudi Arabia: he was extended an open invitation to photograph them for a month in the early 1980s. Courtesy the artist.īirds in flight are another symbol of hope, and a picture of them against a blue sky connects Fire in Cairo to Nothing (2014), John Gossage’s very different book of pictures from the Middle East. The gesture inserts his subjects back into the flow of time, suggesting, perhaps, that their lives will not be arrested by a single moment of violence. They seem sequential, as if Connors had captured them with something akin to the camera’s (aptly named) ‘burst mode’. ![]() But, importantly, each spread features not one but two nearly identical portraits. The images are reminiscent of the hundreds he made for General Assembly (2011–12), his ambitious catalogue of Occupy Wall Street protestors. Here, Connors switches to black and white, and the background recedes as his subjects remove their masks and stare placidly into the lens. Fire is destructive, but it can also be cleansing, and after these images come portraits of 19 seemingly ordinary citizens. Three-quarters of the way through the photographs, however, Connors inserts two pictures of fire that seem to erupt from a dark void. Buildings and cars are torched, graffiti covers the walls, smoke lingers in the air and helicopters loiter overhead. The ambiguity falls away quickly, however, and more than half of the book plunges viewers directly into the conflict. The first figure we encounter wears a reflective mask and a hood with colourful trim, like a disco Darth Vader. Is the atmosphere festive or calamitous? Without context, we’re unsure if the green lights we see are in a nightclub or are created by a gun’s laser sight, or whether the haze is from smoke machines or bombs. Fire in Cairo’s opening images seem deliberately ambiguous. The adoption of the 2012 Egyptian Constitution and the summertime ousting of president Mohamed Morsi bookended this tumultuous period, and his pictures depict a city shredded by antagonism. How can their dynamism, and the forces that shape them, be captured in still photographs? What balance of artistic licence and ‘documentary’ fidelity best encapsulates the essence of a given place? How much written explanation is necessary as an accompaniment? Are these questions more difficult to answer when a place is facing environmental or political distress? Or if it is resolutely foreign to the photographer And how does choosing to photograph such places affect those sites in turn? Several recent photobooks bring these elementary yet persistent questions to mind, and the choices made in each case suggest different routes through a tricky terrain.īoston- and Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Connors made the photographs in his new book, Fire in Cairo (2015), during the first six months of 2013. ![]() Matthew Connors, View from Qubba Palace Gates, 2013. ![]()
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