ABSTRACT
He looks to the left as the gentle waves of the Mediterranean crash around his feet. He is knee deep in the sea, his round belly pushed forward with his arms relaxed by his side. Wearing a white polo shirt and black swimming shorts, the slightly overweight man looks into the distance with a faint smile, his curly hair parted on the left side of his head. The man’s photograph was in a yellow plastic bag with hundreds of other family photographs. The bag was found in Cairo’s Friday Market in the antique section, where traders are called in to clear homes of their old contents. The collected material is then sorted and sold in the market for collectors like myself. This process of disassociation removes objects of everyday life, in this case photographs, from their social context. With so many images in the yellow bag documenting the same individuals, this collection of discarded photos provides an insight into the lives of an Egyptian middle-class family in the mid-twentieth century.
