Laura El-Tantawy recently released a newspaper version of her book, In the Shadow of the Pyramids. This new format offers a different experience from the book, taking away the personal narrative in favor of the words of the people. And this, in Arabic, because it’s the language of the revolution, as well as the photographer’s first language.
Symbolically priced 25 in all main currencies in order to reference the January 25, 2011 Revolution, the newspaper is clearly intended as a historical document celebrating and remembering an event that is now being erased in Egypt.
Some photographs are for that reason exclusive to the newspaper, in the form of two inserts. One of them includes images of the mothers and their dead children, whose visibility is critical in the local context.
The newspaper is clearly conceived in a journalistic manner, but the personal is never too far. Laura El-Tantawy explains: “I like the idea of the newspaper because it goes back to my childhood – memories of my grandfather reading the paper each morning, me running as child to pick up the paper left on our doorstep. I like the smell of the newspaper and the ink it leaves on the fingertips. I think the newspaper is a living object – with time the paper will turn yellow, the images will fade and it will become fragile, the same way we age. It’s a metaphor.”
