The Tour is an attempt to provoke and inquire further into the persistent image of and desire for the ‘Orient’ in our collective imagination. Through a series of photographic images, Iverson takes viewers on a visual quest for knowledge of the Orient, the historical truths, reluctant dreams, and overlapping times of being there. With Egypt and the Levant as magnetic focal points for Iverson, the series creates a quiet yet unsettling relationship between past and present, inhabitants and spaces, locals and visitors.
Iverson’s work documents the fantastical nature of what were once real figures living in real times against the backdrop of enduring historical spaces that he encounters. The Tour offers a vibrant commentary on past dreams and lives we have inherited in the present. Iverson’s juxtaposition of found images with his own photography obliges viewers to reconsider these seemingly old spaces and figures within them.
Spread throughout the gallery, the exhibition will showcase more than thirty-five black and white archival pigment prints and a selection of hand coloured photographs. An oversized, handmade photographic album, in the tradition of the photographic tomes of the 19th century, something Iverson is passionate about and containing more from the series, will be displayed alongside original early travel and architectural photographs of Egypt by J.P Sebah, Francis Frith, Andreas Reiser, Gabriel Lekegian, Alexandre Brignoli and Bonfils amongst others. Additional black and white and hand-colored works will also be on display in clamshell presentation cases.
The artist along with curators Zein Khalifa and Heba Farid invite us to look at such works not as nostalgic imagery of historical ruins or remnants of the past, but as documents of our own life history that we presently inhabit in the form of dreams, fantasies, memories and souvenirs.
Barry Iverson, (American b.1956), has been living and working in Egypt for more than 40 years. Using film and a large format camera for much of his work and printing in a traditional wet darkroom, Iverson’s photographs, rich in detail and tone, revisit the earlier days of the medium. He has long explored issues of memory and its historical context and the desert landscape has been of particular interest to him for many years. Iverson played an important role in rescuing the archive of Master Photographer Van Leo and in reviving the hand coloured process made famous in the first half of the 20th century, a tradition that harks back to historical picture postcards. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 1985 to research the history of photography in Egypt, Iverson’s influence by his predecessors in the region such as Frith, Green, Du Camp and Hunt & Baker is evident in much of his work as is the documentary work of Walker Evans. Iverson’s work is represented in several private and public collections including Harvard University and the American University in Cairo. In 1994 Iverson published the much sought after Comparative Views of Egypt, Cairo: One Hundred Years Later ( Zeitouna). He is a former TIME Magazine photographer and continues to work on editorial as well as commercial commissions.
Barry Iverson – The Tour
Through October 3rd, 2019
17 Bahgat Aly Street, 2nd floor, apt.14, Zamalek
Cairo
