Forga: The city looks back

Forga explores Cairo through discreet photography from a car, examining how social background, gender, and the act of looking shape my relationship with the city. It reflects on visibility, privacy, and the mutual curiosity between observer and observed.

Forga: The City Looks Back

My project began with a practical question: how can I document everyday street life without attracting unwanted attention? Although I am Cairene, born and raised in Cairo, my relationship with the city is shaped by a certain distance due to my social economic background. Living in a gated community for instance, I move through Cairo between enclosed, private spaces, leaving much of its everyday street life unfamiliar to me. Through this project, I sought to discover the city beyond these familiar boundaries, documenting its rhythms, people, and spontaneous encounters through discreet photography. The car becomes a space from which I can observe Cairo with curiosity, offering a point of connection to a city that is both my home and, in many ways, still unknown to me.

As a woman photographing in public, I found that using a camera on the streets of Cairo could draw attention and disrupt the scenes I wanted to capture. Initially, I used my mobile phone discreetly, pretending to speak on a call while holding it to my ear secretly taking photographs. When I transitioned to my film camera, I noticed how its visible presence changed people’s reactions, interrupting the spontaneity I sought to preserve. I returned to my phone, resuming my discreet method of photographing from within the car. What began as a practical solution of discretion gradually developed into a wider inquiry into looking, visibility, and the relationship between the photographer and the photographed.

Through this method, I capture fragments of everyday life in Cairo: families navigating the streets, women moving through public space, motorcycles weaving through traffic, and trucks carrying oversized loads. Gradually, my attention shifted beyond the scenes themselves to the people who looked towards me, often unaware that they were being photographed. Their curiosity became an important part of the work, revealing a social dynamic in which people observe one another, notice strangers, and take an interest in the lives unfolding around them.

As a woman and a photographer, I am both an observer of this environment and a participant in it. While I look out at the city, I am also aware of being looked at. This mutual curiosity creates a conversation between observer and subject, raising questions about visibility, privacy, and how we interpret one another in public space.

Through these encounters, I seek to construct a personal portrait of Cairo that extends beyond its architecture and familiar street scenes. The city emerges through its people, their movements, and their awareness of one another. The car becomes both a vantage point and a boundary, reflecting my relationship with a city I call home but am still discovering.

The City Looks Back explores the tension between proximity and distance, privacy and public life, and the desire to observe without disrupting what is being observed. Rooted in my experience of navigating Cairo as a woman and a photographer, and shaped by my position within the city’s social landscape, the project considers how the spaces from which we look influence what we see and how we relate to others. It asks not only what we see when we look at others, but what happens when we recognize that the gaze is returned.