Over the past decade, one of the major signifiers of change in Egypt has been its transforming physical
landscape—at the architectural, urban and infrastructural scales. Rather than focusing on the
transformations themselves, I focus on the means through which they are framed, contextualized, and
perceived based on my relation to the city.
I rely on compositional symmetry and a play between background and foreground to project a sense of
stability, structure and order to contrast the conditions by which this image was produced.
Photographed from across the street as I walked along Youssef Abbas Street is one of the new public
transit systems under construction. The infrastructure which bisects Cairo’s physical landscape is
intended to connect Cairo’s citizens to the new administrative capital—which is currently also under
construction.
Captured in Nasr City—a once ambitious proposal which was executed as the city of the future following
the 1952 Revolution—this image serves as a representation of the ways in which Cairo’s built
environment has altered not only in the last ten years but also as a broader commentary on the cyclic
reimagings of Cairo’s anticipated futures.