Fire in Cairo

Talking of which, the book can be read either back to front or front to back: in part a nod to the way the Arabic-speaking population of Egypt read their texts, but it also functions as a means of disorienting the reader. The sequence of image works either way, but reading from left to right, as it were, where Connors’ short story appears at the end, one immediately wants to read backwards. Try it the other way and the mood on completion is very different. I went forward, then back, then forward again – you could do this 20 times and still feel that you hadn’t quite understood it, but perhaps that is part of the draw. Which of us can say we fully understand the politics of the Arab Spring? When I ask Connors why the sequence is backwards, he replies with his own question, “Is it?”

The common experience of reading a book is legibility; the process of turning the pages right to left, second nature. There are tiny tweaks to the design – flipping some of the images so they feel odd, increasing the size of the images by millimetres in one direction. “He’s very clever,” says Ceschel, “because the more time you spend with that book, the more that sense of certainty disappears. You read a version of the story and that tells you something, but then you find yourself doubting and reconsidering.”

View from Qubba Palace Gates 1
View from Qubba Palace Gates 1
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Birds on Nile Corniche
Birds on Nile Corniche

Truthful fiction

“I came to see the whole city as a kind of studio for social change,” says Connors, “and so a lot of the pictures are visual or sculptural atmospheres that convey only residues of the turmoil. I was hoping to make something that was able to convey a kind of emotional urgency of Egypt’s revolutionary aspirations; to convey the sense of threat that I experienced all the time, but also this beauty and a kind of mystery.”

Included in the book is a short story Connors wrote. Its tempo is inspired, he says, by the work of Donald Barthelme, whose fiction he first read in college (as an undergraduate he majored in literature) and to whom he has returned on and off ever since. “There are a few stories he has written where he uses these kinds of swift, verbal collage that blend violence and longing and uncertainty, and I think that really resonated with my experiences in Cairo. In a lot of ways, I tried to imitate him – and completely failed, as many others who have tried to imitate him have failed – but I know that that combination of story and images was really important for the book.”

Tear Gas over Qasr al-Nil Bridge
Tear Gas over Qasr al-Nil Bridge

Connors’ departure from Cairo coincided with the ousting of President Morsi. Even with 20,000 images under his belt, he felt he could have stayed longer and taken more. “I knew there were things I was missing, but at the same time I didn’t feel like I was trying to tell a comprehensive story. Ultimately, the book and the work exist as a kind of fiction – the short story in the book is meant to signal that.”

Fire in Cairo is published by Self Publish, Be Happy and is available now, priced £30.

matthewconnors.com

First published in the June 2015 issue of BJP. Find more in-depth features on the world of contemporary photography in every issue and visit The BJP Shop.