Metro. Solo Show. The Townhouse Gallery. 2004.

A photographic series that has been awarded ‘Le Grand Prix’ of the Photographic Biennale in Bamako, Mali and that has been exhibited widely as part of art festivals, group & solo shows. Four of its prints are part of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) Collection.

In early 2003 I began working on a project that would record the rapid changes currently happening in a representative section of Cairo's middle-class, The Metro riders. In a space, where strangers who have a lot of common attributes meet, Middle Class Egyptians are gathered here in a world of their own.  This documentation is an attempt to record how these individuals are framed and vulnerable to cycles of depression, indifference and religious intolerance, illnesses that are both, caused by and transmitted to, the rest of Egyptian and Arab Society and the world. Unaware that they are being photographed, I try to capture the riders' response to the urban underground, the train, the station, and its' vibrant ceramic designs. Riders become figures defined by form, line & color in the midst of a congested modernity, in which they no longer have a sense of place.