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Matinee: 'Farouk Ibrahim'
15 April 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 496th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Farouk Ibrahim.
This 3:45 video by Mahmoud Nasr is a short documentary about Farouk Ibrahim, "the famous Egyptian photographer you've never heard about." Ibrahim spent 59 years working as a photojournalist chronicling the history of his country from 1952 to 2011. He eventually became the personal photographer of Anwar Sadat, who gave him unusual access over 13 months.
He himself kept a very low profile, preferring to "make stars out of his subjects than be a star himself," as his son Karim, who narrates the film, says.
Karim, who is himself a photojournalist at Akhbar El Youm where his father worked in the 1960s, did more than narrate the film, though.
In 2008, when his father was still alive, he began digitizing his father's archive of 600,000 photos. That's when he discovered that even on the day he was born, his father had a shoot.
Photography became a language they shared, showing each other their photos. But, Karim notes, there are only five photographs of the two of them together.
This conversation continued after Ibrahim's death in 2011 when Karim discovered his father's method of ranking his shots with dots on the film. A green dot, for example, was his best shot. A white dot meant is was a lesser selection.
Karim put together an exhibition of 140 photos by his father, which he titled The Legend to focus attention on the man who captured the images. "He had spent his whole life behind the camera and many didn’t really know him," he said in an interview earlier this year.
Interestingly enough, the video never mentions Karim's name. Like father, like son.