Laura El-Tantawy

Laura El-Tantawy is an Egyptian photographer who was born in Woecestershire, England to Egyptian parents. She attended a high school in Saudi Arabia and started university in Cairo, Egypt. She completed her degree in the US. Since Laura has been living between the East and the West for most of her life, she has experienced both immense enlightenment and anxiety. She had to contemplate notions of home, identity, culture and her self. Laura uses photography as an artistic medium of limitless boundaries to explore these themes. She has an extremely  impressionistic eye on reality, and Laura explores social and environmental issues linking to her background. Because of Laura’s multicultural lifestyle as well as using photography as an artistic expression she also uses it as an inner voice to reflect upon her own identity and how it relates to the world around her. She mostly works on self-initiated projects.

In an article by National Geographic, Laura says, “My photographic interest in a project typically stems from having some personal connection with the subject matter,” she said. “Having lived between East and West much of my life, I have often felt lost between the traditional ideologies instilled in my upbringing and the extremely liberal practices of the West. I had to find a defining balance for myself as an individual, and my work as a documentary photographer has helped me do that. Dealing with who I am as a person and my position on the critical social issues facing the world today—particularly those pertaining to my background—is at the heart of all the themes I take on in my work.”

Laura  El-Tantawy did a project called Beyond here is nothing at all. This is how Laura describes the series. Beyond Here Is Nothing is a photographic meditation on the notion of home. To be home is to feel a strong connection to a land and a grounding to its roots. For much of my life home has been an abstract place far away from my reach. This body of work navigates the boundaries of being – exploring the

unsettling feeling of rootlessness, the mental burden of loneliness and the constant search for belonging in unfamiliar places. Here are some of the images from the series with a description of what the images mean and contain.

I love the whole of this series by Laura. Each of her images are so unique and creative. You can see her creative eye and the way she views things. The series has such a contrast of ideas ranging from silhouettes, reflections, blurred lights, and images of clouds. This series is very surreal and has a dream like effect to it. She uses a lot of colour and shapes to create her story like images. She has framed a particular object that she wants to fragment to reveal what she sees. The series is about Laura’s idea of home and of her surroundings. Since Laura didn’t have the benefit of feeling rooted to one particular place she tries to capture this feeling rootlessness within her images. The images do have this sense of loneliness and confusion and that is what Laura is trying to get across. I choose Laura  El-Tantawy as my artist research because I love how shes uses double exposure and other forms of manipulation to create the things she wants to reveal in her process.

Another series that Laura does is called A Series of Surprises and Human Interventions.Laura admits that this series happened by accident.  The series was captured in December 2015. She had traveled to the city of her birth for the first time. With the use of a Polaroid and some film she walked around the city streets of Ronkswood. She said she choose a Polaroid as her tool because she wanted to bring to life the history of her birth place without changing the way it looked in her head. Since she used a Polaroid, to Laura’ s frustration she had discovered that the images had not turned out. She says ‘ thinking an image was captured only to discover it wasn’t.’ This is how she describes the series of her home city. “The images are an imaginary landscape where the touch of man adds life in the form of chemicals – a wave of colors reminiscent of water, vibrant plantations and snowy mountains.”  Here are some of the images that she created. 

These images are another form of manipulation by Laura. Instead of digitally manipulating the image, she does it by hand using water and chemicals.  I like both of these series by Laura and I want to use both ideas in some way for my next step. I  plan to do a similar process using the concept of double exposure. I also plan to experiment with photo paper and chemicals to create some man made landscapes like Laura’s.

An article by Lewis Bush called ‘ Eight ‘rules’ of photography that are worth breaking ‘ explains how breaking the rules of photography can be extremely beneficial. He writes that breaking the rules can be a way of seeing the world in a new light, “break all the rules and pioneer a new way of seeing the world.”  He also says that the real stories of our time aren’t always plain to see. He is trying to explain that sometimes the most interesting concept is not clearly visible. We as the photographer have to break the rules and push the boundaries to isolate the what we really want to see.  In the article, Bush talks about a photographer called William Eugene Smith. Smith is an American Photojournalist who is extremely dedicated to his projects. In 1955 Smith traveled to Pittsburgh on what was meant to be a three week assignment, however turned into a year long ‘photographic binge.’ He came away with over 17,000 images.

He later moved to Japan to document the consequences of devastating industrial pollution. Within this process, he faced extreme violence from the people he was exposing. He was also becoming to involved with the people he was photographing.  According to one writer, Smith was the man who tried to document everything. During his photographic career, Smith broke nearly every rule there was in photography. Some of these included, posing his subjects, manipulating his prints and becoming dangerously involved in his stories. When people quentioned him to why he broke the rules he said, “I didn’t write them- why should I follow them?”  Smith proved that successful photographers can break the rules. Bush writes that many rules restrict the medium, “serve vested interests and prevent photographers from revealing the critical issues that are shaping our modern world.”  Here are some images by Smith. 

These are the eight rules that Bush talks about. The rule of Objectivity, the rule of Audience, The rule of Manipulation, The rule of Reality, The rule of Technicality, The rule of ownership, The rule of the camera and the Rule of rule breaking. The rule that I will be focusing on is the rule of manipulation.

This rule is about photographers being forbidden to use any form of digital editing to manipulate the meaning of their images. Some photographers like Steve McCurry are more interested in the professional accolades than the integrity of the stories they use. However, Bush believes that every stage of the photographic process is a manipulation. A documentary filmmaker called Errol Morries explains you don’t need to manipulate an image to mislead an audience, you just need to simply change the caption. He also says that when used in the right context, manipulation can reveal the truth. A Dutch photographer called Alice Wielinga traveled to North Korea, she found it hard to capture the truth. She says, “I felt that, with mere documenting, I wasn’t able to tell the story as I was experiencing it,” Since she was not happy with her images, she decided to digitally merge her images of official North Korea propaganda with her own images of workers and decaying factories. “I see propaganda and reality as two sides of the same coin,” she says. “Propaganda is an essential part of everyday life in North Korea, and because of that a reality in itself.” Here are some of her final edits.