This week, in the lobby of a vast apartment building on Sherif Street in downtown Cairo, I made a request the doorman seemed to find rather strange: “I’d like to see the art exhibition please.
He directed me to the fourth floor, where a leg of PhotoCairo 4: The Long Shortcut is currently on view. The place is home to four exhibits: Doa Aly’s “A Tress of Hair, David Thorne and Julia Meltzer’s “Not a Matter of If But When, Arthur Zmijewski’s “Them, and a striking photo exhibit by French born artist Bernard Guillot called “The Waiting Room, the standout work of the four.
The setting of the apartment on Sherif Street lends a particular atmosphere to the way “The Waiting Room is viewed. From its windows, we regard the city that inspired this work, its beautiful dying architecture and cracked facades. In the building’s unkempt lobby, we detect the roots of Guillot’s poetic subject; the ordinary grace of Cairo, a skeleton of what it once was, loudly drowning.
Guillot’s contribution to the apartment exhibit differs significantly from the other works exhibited in two regards. His constitute the only still images; moreover, stylistically, his works depart from the raw, contemporary digital language upon which the other works rest. In addition, his work is distinguished for an overt poetic imagery – a visual relative akin to magical realism – and a play of light and shadow that only actual film can produce.
Guillot presents a series of elegant black and white photos, taken between 1973 and 2003. The work sums up the experience of living for 30 years in a room at Cairo’s Hotel Maffet-Astoria.
The photos depict a relationship with architecture and furniture that transcends the physical. All things breathe. In Guillot’s black and white images, Cairo’s textured walls stand alone like murky, singular stories. The artist has chosen two distinct subjects: those that capture life within inanimate objects, and animate objects, particularly the human form, abstracted.
Both subjects are eloquent and legitimate. In the images containing the human form, experimentation is the most evident quality. One man, whom the viewer might presume to be the artist himself, makes a recurrent appearance in the pictures. Bald and starkly white, the man occupies what can be described as a mystical place in the works.
In one frame for example, he appears in silhouette behind a gauze curtain.
Set in front of a day-lit window, the curtain is elevated to bizarre extremity when the man stands behind it and photographs himself. The effect creates the illusion of a man inside a light box or a magician behind a screen.
Another example is a portrait of the same man, standing on top of a stool on what appears to be a white gown. Below himself is a bright light, amorphous yet shining downwards, resembling a messiah in his living room.
Whether animate or inanimate, Guillot’s subjects capture mystery and the artful elegance of times gone by. An enormous spiraling staircase through which antique elevator falls becomes the silent teller of a fabulous secret.
From the layered apparition of man in a galabeyya, to the sole image of an ovular mirror reflecting a shabby stained glass window, the works rely on a sophisticated restraint. Each image, however spontaneous it may be, appears to be the product of long term investigations and mastery of craft. Even the most humorous of the works are simultaneously quite serious.
There’s also something distinctly French in his style – the work harkens a cross between Cartier-Bresson, pioneering master of street photography, and avante-guardist Man Ray, who although born in America, spent most of his career in Paris.
For whatever reasons, Guillot spent 30 years, on and off, in a studio in the Hotel Maffet-Astoria. Perhaps this is the reason he seems so intimate with his Cairene subjects.
He walks amid cracked and gritty walls as if his camera were a hand touching familiar skin. In his lens, these surroundings seem neither distant nor exotic; they simply reek of a peculiar glamour, the dressing room of a silent-movie star.
“The Waiting Room is currently on view with other exhibits from 10 am to 6 pm at the Immobilya Building, Sherif St.
