Stills... are only stills.

Those photographers with black cameras stuck to their noses and grinning mouths to fake looking indulged and professional drive me crazy. Photography was never an art - I am sure I. G. will agree with me on that. To me, photography is too new age, too kitschy – too “Paolo Coello” to say the least. If we go a few years back – four or so, one could have taken a Calculus book or two and went to Cilantro Merghany to study on a Friday morning. That was always a quite resort – apart from all the domestic civil wars and all. But then… things grew too quiet. One Friday morning, I was solving some mathematical problems on Integration by Parts and I looked up for a second away from the Calculus drill, to see everyone around me has grown long – but not too long - hair, smoked Kent cigarettes, held a Paolo Coello book in one hand, an American coffee mug in the other and had an expensive mobile phone on the table – that can save several ringtones to several people, but which had Buddha Bar’s “Secret Love” as its one and only ringtone.

The air grew too stinky… I left… to no avail of course.

Now those people wear out their eyes on a Brazilian journalist’s cheap philosophical words in the morning and spend the money left in their pockets – after extravagantly spending it in Diwan Zamalek and Cilantro Merghany, and isn’t that what’s money is made for my dear new-age intellectual friend? – at night, on photography classes and tripods and camera accessories. Then comes the harder part… what should be photographed.

If you are not a photographer, you will not understand what kind of a-fucking-important-thing-this-is. Those people go far… real far. There are several types. The most expected of which are the nature sissies. Those spend whatever money is remaining in their pockets – after the Diwan Zamalek, Cilantro Merghany and make-Kodak-a-bigger-corporation shopping spree – on trips to places you probably never heard of – which is the part I greatly appreciate. However, after our devoted photographer has travelled by bus with other fellow photographers or by his new-age Jeep Cherokee to a place that is very far far away and full of desert and some stones they refer to as mountains and after our devoted photographer takes them pictures and satisfies his/her sissy sexuality towards Mother Nature… you look at them pictures and you just wanna look them in the eyes and tell them that they could have just drove to Sha2 Al Te3ban or to the stones-full Wadi Degla to capture the same exact photos of some sands and some stones – but you wouldn’t wanna tell them that, after all nature sissies can be quite amusing in other aspects of life – of which I can’t remember any right now.

Nature sissies are very easy to spot and are the gum that loses its sweetness after a very very short while. The more interesting kind is the intellectual highly-educated new age stratum of detectives. Those Sherlock-Holmes of photography have such a sharp eye – you wouldn’t want to fart in their presence. The first step is that they spread in poor areas or areas that are so very full of “culture” – sigh, I have to use their vocabulary for a second, bear with me. The trick is that the more the photo they capture satisfies two elements, the more they get too proud of themselves and each goes home – him thinking he has a bigger sexual organ and her thinking she has bigger boobs. The first element is how contradictory is the picture to the bourgeoisie-ness of your expensive camera… for example, picture that street kid who is too dirty and is begging for a McDonald’s fry off of your lunch, or that door porter sipping on tea and dragging on a Cleopatra “Soopaarrr” – the more your picture reflects agony of the Egyptian nation and the more it is an option for a cheap Leftist newspaper, the more you gain points. See, here comes the feeling of purpose and hey-I-just-found-an-existentialist-answer sort of pride. The second element is how the elements in the picture appear as if they didn’t know the picture was being taken – even though the flash is made to blind them, but never mind. Now that’s very easy to achieve with things that don’t breathe – like a sheesha that you pay 1.25 pounds for (remember, we are in a poor area) or a broken wooden window pane. However, things get slightly more complicated as you take pictures of begging children or door porters – thus, our devoted photographer might want to tip them to pretend they don’t notice his flashy existence.

Another type of our devoted photographers is them with a details-fetish. Now those can take 9 to 99 pictures of those tiny salt and pepper containers found on restaurants’ tables, put them up on Facebook, add a caption to each and every one of them and never bother to convince the world of the difference between those bunch of pictures that just look the same to me – let alone the need to take one in the first place – because they “know” their artistic sense of “details-capturing” is well communicated. I will not indulge into details about this kind – I dated one of them.

Let’s be fair, though. There is this guy whom I consider the only Egyptian photographer who has any taste and style to what he’s doing. But again to me photography, will always be an everlasting failing technique to bring soul to stills… and soul cannot be flavored with poses nor with expensive devotion – but rather with drunken smiles on a table having some empty bottles of wine on it and perhaps a caption saying “Cairo 2005”, “Alexandria 2006”, “Beirut 2009”…