Everyday life for a soldier in Egypt in 1941 included some pretty unpostable activities: rifle practice, wrecking tanks, sinking ships, covering the bodies of dead comrades in the desert. However, the activity in this photo looks fairly harmless. My father captioned it ‘Shufty’, which comes from an Arabic word for ‘a look’, as in ‘take a shufty at this’.
Three curious things I’ve considered: What are the tubular projections behind the men? What is the Egyptian boy doing? Why is one man naked while all others are clothed?
I found this photo in my father’s album from his time in Egypt in 1941/42 with the Australian Army. It’s simply captioned ‘Roxy Theatre’, though I’m not sure if it’s in Cairo or elsewhere. Searching online hasn’t turned up anything quite like it.
This photo from my father’s album of 1941 is captioned by him “Electric trains”. I initially believed this building was the old Palace Hotel in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, but today I contacted someone in Heliopolis about my photos and he has corrected me.
This building is in the same area as the Palace Hotel which is now one of the presidential palaces, but the photo shows the el-Korba (the curve) district of Heliopolis which was once occupied by aristocratic Egyptians and some Europeans. The architecture of the area was commissioned by the Belgian Baron Empain in the early 1900s; the building in the photo was built in 1907. The architecture is unique, consisting of European-style arcaded balconies and broad colonnaded sidewalks combined with Islamic (Moorish-Persian) domes and geometric and arabesque patterns. The area was neglected at the end of the twentieth century as a reaction against old colonial influences, but after Heliopolis celebrated its centenary in 2005 the locals began to plan for the preservation of the architecture as part of Cairo’s heritage. Since 2005 a festival has been held annually to celebrate the Korba district and its uniqueness. In January this year a group of volunteers established the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative (HHI) with a vision to revive the area’s architecture and culture and to reduce the gridlocked traffic, which was clearly, looking at this photo, not a problem in 1941.
Something is wrong about this photo. When an Englishman stands behind African men in one of their feluccas on their river in their country, when he is the passenger, not the worker, when he’s wearing a white pith helmet and smoking a pipe with his hands on his hips, it’s clear he’s dominating them. And that’s always wrong.
This confident colonial chap seems to have been living under a hot sun for quite a while; his skin is almost as dark as the sailors’.
Ailsa (http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/08/04/leading-lines/) has proposed that we find a photo containing ‘leading lines’. Well, I’m no photographer or artist, so this was a technical term I had to look up. I now know they are lines in an image that lead the eye to a point, either in or out of the picture. In my father’s 1941 album of Egyptian photos, there are a few urban scenes with streets disappearing into the distance. But in this one, below, the roads coming towards us are leading our eye to the centre of the photo.
It was taken in what was called, in the 1940s, Soliman Pasha Square, now known as Talaat Harb Square (Midan Talaat Harb), a short distance from Tahrir Square. In the centre of the square, in this photo, is a statue of Soliman Pasha which stood there from 1874 until 1964. Soliman Pasha was a general, born Joseph Anthelme Sève in Lyon, France, who served under Bonaparte and then in Egypt was a military expert in the army of Mohamed Ali. He converted to Islam and took the name Soliman Pasha.
At the far right of the photo is the once-opulent Groppi’s, formerly a Parisian-style café, tearoom and patisserie. Giacomo Groppi, a Swiss pastry maker, opened it in 1926 following success with other patisseries in Egypt. From the 1920s and through the war years, Groppi’s was the place to be seen. During the war, officers often stopped by for coffee or dinner or to find some female company.
While at the time this photo was taken the British were the resident colonials – hence the Australians were there defending Egypt – in the previous century it was the French who were leaving their mark. In the 1940s French influence is evident everywhere, not just the Frenchman on the plinth and the patisserie that sold pastries made from secret recipes written in French, but the architecture is also of French neoclassical style from the era of Soliman Pasha in the 19th century. Note some of the signs are also in French. In the late 20th century Egyptian governments wanted to remove reminders of colonialism and so today, so I’ve read, much of the European-style glamour is neglected and dusty. The statue of Soliman Pasha has now been moved to a military museum and a statue of Talaat Harb, an economist, stands in its place.
On a family outing to the Pumpkin Festival in Collector (a no-horse town near Canberra), I went off in search of pumpkins and lost my husband. When I found him he was shooting purple bears.
Purple bears at the Collector Pumpkin Festival (Photo: Brett Worth)
Why pose outside when you can pose inside and pretend to be outside?
Here’s a great illustration of Orientalism: a European model imagined as an Arab. Exotic oasis with odalisque. Orientalist photography and painting were born from European colonisation of Middle and Far Eastern countries. Artists and photographers at the end of the 19th century and up to the Second World War years produced paintings and postcards depicting exaggeratedly different and exotic females both in and out of the studio. Outside the studio, photographers captured images of women who were mostly covered. In the staged setting of a studio, women were mostly uncovered, and it’s these photographs that express a Western male’s fantasies of penetrating the harem, in a scene which could be created with actual North African women or, as here, with a European model posing as an odalisque (a female slave or concubine). The images say more about the colonial perspective than about Arabs: the men were seen as enviable sheikhs with many wives and concubines and the women were often painted as belly dancers whose sole occupation was to entertain and satisfy men. We, the Western viewers of these images, both men and women, were convinced, by the contrast, that we were civilised. Except, this is an image my father obtained in colonised Egypt while fighting in a six-year-long war between civilised countries.
My post has only two colours: black and white. The photo is entitled ‘Water cows’ (water buffalo) and comes from my father’s war album of photos taken in the Middle East. This one is in Egypt, where the water buffalo is the most important domestic animal.
If farmers traditionally transport their cows on foot along a certain route, then an expanding city will just have to accommodate them.
The weekly photo challenge instruction is “Share a photo that makes you dream”. When I look at news footage of Syria these days, I wonder if it will ever again look like it does in this photo from 1942. Let’s dream it can be this peaceful some day. Soon.
The 2/15th battalion of the Australian Imperial Forces, which my father was a part of, went to Syria in January 1942 for several months of frontier garrison duty. I have several photos of the region from his album, but the Biblical tone of this one makes it the best. Click it to see the detail.
