Synopsis
Go Down, Moses is book project that was conceived from the outset as a sequence of photographs existing in a relation to a parallel body of text.
The project is about a place in the process of becoming a tourist enclave and what has precipitated such a condition. Tourism in Sinai could be traced to the place’s mythological register as ‘wilderness.’ It was this image of the landscape that precipitated the palimpsest that is South Sinai. But what is wilderness exactly? It is not simply uninhabited land. Wilderness is a set: construed, negotiated and lived-in. During the course of the project I commissioned writers from diverse backgrounds to reflect on some of the issues I encountered during the fieldwork. Reciprocally, the dialogues that ensued came to re-inform my work in situ. The writers were not to write, however, based on the content of the photographs but were to follow their own trajectory of investigation.
NB. The series can be viewed at: http://thewhiteboard.info/page/go-down-moses
Forward: context for unrealization
The aim behind the project was to reflect on issues of tourism and regional development and to document a region in the process of becoming a tourist enclave. This might sound as a conclusion rather than a premise for the investigation. True. And the irony is that this state of becoming-a-tourist-enclave that was the raison de être of Go Down, Moses: Funding came from a grant-making programme that united tourism promotion and regional re-territorization under the rubric of development. The making of Go Down, Moses involved a number of parties: I was the initiator, photographer and editor of the book. A local art collective provided the institutional support while funding came from the European Union under the aegis of the local government. This amounts to four entities—read agendas. And there was the land itself. With its territorial history it stood as the fifth entity, read political entity. Politicality was something that I wanted to prudently handle or even skirt if I am to leverage the book’s safe passage to the printer. That was a slippery line to tread for any work tackling a land or territory will always slip into the political. Local government officials demanded the exclusion of substantial portion of the material in the book draft, both visual and textual. These were photographs and passages that they regarded as too critical or politically tinged. The titles has has irked some and the references to Sinai’s territorial histories was regarded as politically inappropriate. There would not be much material left to make a book anyway so I opted to keep the book as-is their demands were rejected. Consequently the funder refused to authorize provisions scheduled to cover printing costs. Publication was cancelled and until this moment Go Down, Moses remains complete but unpublished. Introduction & Essay Précis
Go Down, Moses is book project that was conceived from the outset as a body of photographs existing in a relation to a parallel body of text. Both with their intertwining histories. This is not a photoseries as such but could be better seen a sequence of photographs where text is part of the syntax.
The project was carried out between 2008 and 2010. The idea came in 2006, however. I was contemplating a photobook project as commentary on tourism and the social topography in Egyptian desert regions. A friend with whom I was collaborating on another project called it ‘tourism the edge.’ The ‘edge’ is not only a metaphorical denomination of what lies at the edge of social existence and of the rural-metropolitan encounter but also geographical denoting the frontiers of the country. An edge could be a whole region, and Sinai was case in point—I mean South Sinai. The South is different: in the South you are either a tourist or work in tourism. Tourism, in its hegemonic agency, articulates spaces, assigns roles and puts cogency on things.
Finney and Watson were two sociologists who labeled tourism development in the South Pacific ‘a new kind of sugar.’ This book is not about the Pacific. Nor it was about William Faulkner’s novel where this book came to be named after. It is a about a particular socio-spatial formation that mark the South Sinai. To provide a commentary on a place in the state of becoming a tourist enclave. This is not to entail, however, a disapproving stance on my part, after all tourism in Sinai is not a newcomer, it has a long history that renders it embroiled in the local human ecology. That was a history of mobility, of peregrination.
Tourism in Sinai can also be traced to Sinai’s biblical history and its register as mythical place. I was intrigued by the way a narrative can author a place. The thematic biblical setting of ‘the wilderness’ was the text that had written Sinai and guaranteed Sinai’s epitomic place in narrative geography and eventually precipitated tourism. Time after time the an image of the land as ‘the wilderness of Sinai’ has been composed by the travelling subject: traveling monks, colonial explorers, development operators, photographers, anthropologists, tourists and, for that matter, Moses. South Sinai is palimpsest; a continuous process of sedimentation of textuality and practice excavated though its iconography of wilderness-landscape. It is the progeny of mythology, tourism and local nomadic modes of inhabitance. The photo-narrative in this book also partakes of that positionlaity of the travelling subject, presenting a peripatetic encounter with Sinai’s everydayness and landscapes.
The title of this book refers to Sinai’s mythological history, but the project was actually named after William Faulkner’s 1942 novel. As an American novel about an American South I wondered what sort of topology would render Sinai such a proximate condition to Faulkner’s ‘South’; what sort of semiotics did ‘Sinai’ invoke, and if I could bring it back to contemporary South Sinai. ‘Moses’ becomes a metonymy of the conditions tourism.
During the course of the project, I commissioned writers from diverse backgrounds to reflect on some of the issues I encountered during the fieldwork. Reciprocally, the dialogues that ensued came to re-inform my work in situ. Contributors’ texts were not to be based on the content of the photographs but were to reflect the writer’s own trajectory of investigation.
The first essay by Mirjam Brusius explores the intertwined history of tourism, biblical narrative and photography. Brusius traces European rediscovery of Sinai during the 19th century as biblical historical site and questions whether the concomitant use of photography as an archaeological tool has been responsible for Sinai’s commercial reinvention during the 20th century.
Taking on a very different tone, Cynthia Cruz’s essay brings the reader to the present and also to an almost opposite perspective: that of ignorance. Cruz states only what comes into the purview of the casual observer. She examines how such a conglomeration of data impinges on the mind of the reader: the reader as the narrator herself, the reader as the prospective tourist, or the reader as the reader of this book.
The notion of ‘wilderness’ is a connate to the Sinai; having a mythological signification in the biblical narrative as well as exchange value in the narrative of tourism. Waleed Hazbun’s essay tackles the notion ‘wilderness’ head-on. It explores the territoriality of Sinai as the frontier during the second half of the 20th century and the implications of the ideologies of the wilderness according to two national projects: Israeli and Egyptian.
Within the American culture historical context the wilderness was has always been tied to the notion of the ‘frontier and the idea ’self-transformation and self-realization. During the course of his ethnographic field work in Dahab Michael Kennedy was faced with remark by one of his interlocutors: “this is the new America.” Taking on scuba diving as a socio-economic paradigm, Kennedy posits Dahab as multiple domains of social existence defined by diverse notions of self-realization according to two different immigrant social groups: Egyptians from the Nile Valley and European expatriate community.
Nadia Dropkin’s essay detours to the first-person narrative. A personal essay recounting a tourist-local encounter and the exoticism and sexism that fuels it. Meanwhile Jessica Jacob, harkens back to the 19th century ton survey Western female self-conceptions in the act of tourism within the Arab world. She posits Sinai as particularly seductive combination of an ultra-modern tourist space that is simultaneously experienced as existing outside of modernity. Jacob’s essay stems into contemporary interviews with Western women who have 'fallen for' Sinai and the gendered, radicalized, and class constructs that reverse the western-constructed male gaze upon the ethnic other.
The last essay stems from the question as to why William Faulkner titled his 1942 novel ‘Go Down, Moses.’ From this point of departure, Ahmad Hosni explore
Synopsis
Go Down, Moses is book project that was conceived from the outset as a sequence of photographs existing in a relation to a parallel body of text.
The project is about a place in the process of becoming a tourist enclave and what has precipitated such a condition. Tourism in Sinai could be traced to the place’s mythological register as ‘wilderness.’ It was this image of the landscape that precipitated the palimpsest that is South Sinai. But what is wilderness exactly? It is not simply uninhabited land. Wilderness is a set: construed, negotiated and lived-in. During the course of the project I commissioned writers from diverse backgrounds to reflect on some of the issues I encountered during the fieldwork. Reciprocally, the dialogues that ensued came to re-inform my work in situ. The writers were not to write, however, based on the content of the photographs but were to follow their own trajectory of investigation.
NB. The series can be viewed at: http://thewhiteboard.info/page/go-down-moses
Forward: context for unrealization
The aim behind the project was to reflect on issues of tourism and regional development and to document a region in the process of becoming a tourist enclave. This might sound as a conclusion rather than a premise for the investigation. True. And the irony is that this state of becoming-a-tourist-enclave that was the raison de être of Go Down, Moses: Funding came from a grant-making programme that united tourism promotion and regional re-territorization under the rubric of development. The making of Go Down, Moses involved a number of parties: I was the initiator, photographer and editor of the book. A local art collective provided the institutional support while funding came from the European Union under the aegis of the local government. This amounts to four entities—read agendas. And there was the land itself. With its territorial history it stood as the fifth entity, read political entity. Politicality was something that I wanted to prudently handle or even skirt if I am to leverage the book’s safe passage to the printer. That was a slippery line to tread for any work tackling a land or territory will always slip into the political. Local government officials demanded the exclusion of substantial portion of the material in the book draft, both visual and textual. These were photographs and passages that they regarded as too critical or politically tinged. The titles has has irked some and the references to Sinai’s territorial histories was regarded as politically inappropriate. There would not be much material left to make a book anyway so I opted to keep the book as-is their demands were rejected. Consequently the funder refused to authorize provisions scheduled to cover printing costs. Publication was cancelled and until this moment Go Down, Moses remains complete but unpublished. Introduction & Essay Précis
Go Down, Moses is book project that was conceived from the outset as a body of photographs existing in a relation to a parallel body of text. Both with their intertwining histories. This is not a photoseries as such but could be better seen a sequence of photographs where text is part of the syntax.
The project was carried out between 2008 and 2010. The idea came in 2006, however. I was contemplating a photobook project as commentary on tourism and the social topography in Egyptian desert regions. A friend with whom I was collaborating on another project called it ‘tourism the edge.’ The ‘edge’ is not only a metaphorical denomination of what lies at the edge of social existence and of the rural-metropolitan encounter but also geographical denoting the frontiers of the country. An edge could be a whole region, and Sinai was case in point—I mean South Sinai. The South is different: in the South you are either a tourist or work in tourism. Tourism, in its hegemonic agency, articulates spaces, assigns roles and puts cogency on things.
Finney and Watson were two sociologists who labeled tourism development in the South Pacific ‘a new kind of sugar.’ This book is not about the Pacific. Nor it was about William Faulkner’s novel where this book came to be named after. It is a about a particular socio-spatial formation that mark the South Sinai. To provide a commentary on a place in the state of becoming a tourist enclave. This is not to entail, however, a disapproving stance on my part, after all tourism in Sinai is not a newcomer, it has a long history that renders it embroiled in the local human ecology. That was a history of mobility, of peregrination.
Tourism in Sinai can also be traced to Sinai’s biblical history and its register as mythical place. I was intrigued by the way a narrative can author a place. The thematic biblical setting of ‘the wilderness’ was the text that had written Sinai and guaranteed Sinai’s epitomic place in narrative geography and eventually precipitated tourism. Time after time the an image of the land as ‘the wilderness of Sinai’ has been composed by the travelling subject: traveling monks, colonial explorers, development operators, photographers, anthropologists, tourists and, for that matter, Moses. South Sinai is palimpsest; a continuous process of sedimentation of textuality and practice excavated though its iconography of wilderness-landscape. It is the progeny of mythology, tourism and local nomadic modes of inhabitance. The photo-narrative in this book also partakes of that positionlaity of the travelling subject, presenting a peripatetic encounter with Sinai’s everydayness and landscapes.
The title of this book refers to Sinai’s mythological history, but the project was actually named after William Faulkner’s 1942 novel. As an American novel about an American South I wondered what sort of topology would render Sinai such a proximate condition to Faulkner’s ‘South’; what sort of semiotics did ‘Sinai’ invoke, and if I could bring it back to contemporary South Sinai. ‘Moses’ becomes a metonymy of the conditions tourism.
During the course of the project, I commissioned writers from diverse backgrounds to reflect on some of the issues I encountered during the fieldwork. Reciprocally, the dialogues that ensued came to re-inform my work in situ. Contributors’ texts were not to be based on the content of the photographs but were to reflect the writer’s own trajectory of investigation.
The first essay by Mirjam Brusius explores the intertwined history of tourism, biblical narrative and photography. Brusius traces European rediscovery of Sinai during the 19th century as biblical historical site and questions whether the concomitant use of photography as an archaeological tool has been responsible for Sinai’s commercial reinvention during the 20th century.
Taking on a very different tone, Cynthia Cruz’s essay brings the reader to the present and also to an almost opposite perspective: that of ignorance. Cruz states only what comes into the purview of the casual observer. She examines how such a conglomeration of data impinges on the mind of the reader: the reader as the narrator herself, the reader as the prospective tourist, or the reader as the reader of this book.
The notion of ‘wilderness’ is a connate to the Sinai; having a mythological signification in the biblical narrative as well as exchange value in the narrative of tourism. Waleed Hazbun’s essay tackles the notion ‘wilderness’ head-on. It explores the territoriality of Sinai as the frontier during the second half of the 20th century and the implications of the ideologies of the wilderness according to two national projects: Israeli and Egyptian.
Within the American culture historical context the wilderness was has always been tied to the notion of the ‘frontier and the idea ’self-transformation and self-realization. During the course of his ethnographic field work in Dahab Michael Kennedy was faced with remark by one of his interlocutors: “this is the new America.” Taking on scuba diving as a socio-economic paradigm, Kennedy posits Dahab as multiple domains of social existence defined by diverse notions of self-realization according to two different immigrant social groups: Egyptians from the Nile Valley and European expatriate community.
Nadia Dropkin’s essay detours to the first-person narrative. A personal essay recounting a tourist-local encounter and the exoticism and sexism that fuels it. Meanwhile Jessica Jacob, harkens back to the 19th century ton survey Western female self-conceptions in the act of tourism within the Arab world. She posits Sinai as particularly seductive combination of an ultra-modern tourist space that is simultaneously experienced as existing outside of modernity. Jacob’s essay stems into contemporary interviews with Western women who have 'fallen for' Sinai and the gendered, radicalized, and class constructs that reverse the western-constructed male gaze upon the ethnic other.
The last essay stems from the question as to why William Faulkner titled his 1942 novel ‘Go Down, Moses.’ From this point of departure, Ahmad Hosni explore