Sony Gallery Hosts 'John Feeney Retrospective:
Forty Years Photographing Egypt'

The Sony Gallery for photography celebrated its third photo exhibition for the year 2005-6 with a exhibition featuring the work of John Feeney. The show, titled "John Feeney Retrospective: 40 Years Photographing Egypt," featured more than 60 of Feeney's photographs of Egypt.

"Those pictures are very near to my heart." Feeney said. "From hundreds of pictures I've taken throughout my life, these are very special to me."

The gallery was filled with visitors for the opening reception and ribbon-cutting ceremony, which was presided over by AUC provost Tim Sullivan and guest of honor H.E. Sir Derek Plumbly, British ambassador to Egypt. Adham Center Director Abdallah Schleifer, the press, and the public also joined Feeney to celebrate the show, which lasted from March 7 to April 21.

John Feeney is a New Zealand-born photographer who arrived in Egypt in 1963 to make "Fountains of the Sun" at the request of Dr. Tharwat Okasha, then minister of culture, who had asked Feeney to produce, film, write, and edit documentaries for the ministry.

"So it was in 1963 that, armed with at least a little knowledge of Egypt, I came to Cairo for one year, and stayed for forty," Feeney writes in his book John Feeney Photographing Egypt: Forty Years Behind the Lens, which was available at the exhibition. "What is it that makes us long to visit distant lands? Perhaps, at heart, we are still nomads setting out on journeys that can never be imagined beforehand."

Feeney's association with AUC is longstanding. Over many years, Feeney has spent hundreds of hours researching his films and articles at the Cresswell Collection, now housed in the University's Rare Books and Special Collections Library.

At the show's opening, Feeney accompanied guests on a tour in which he explained the pictures. People attending the show listened attentively to his reminiscences.

"Some of my photographs stem from my film projects, and films in turn date from when I was just 8 years old, when I made a Christmas wish for a small magic lantern. That was the beginning," Feeney said. "So you see how important it is to have these wishes in the first place -- the wish to come to Egypt, the wish for a magic lantern. From my earliest years I was always one for magic, the childish magic of boyhood."

Several photographs in the exhibition depict places that have been completely changed since the time the photograph was taken. In the photograph "The Last Nile Flood, 1964," for example, Feeney captured the image of a pair of giant statues of Amenhotep III at the time of Egypt's last Nile flood in September, 1964. Since the building of the Aswan dam, these two giant statues have been moved to other places.

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-Usama Najeeb