The Egypt of Naguib Mahfouz.

Inspired by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature Georg Kürzinger, a photographer from Munich, has taken photos of scenes in Cairo and other places in Egypt from 1998 to 2001. The exhibition presents a selection of 56 photographs. Six photo galleries and some introductory pictures attend to subjects such as Islam, the feast of sacrifice and Ramadan, Copts, men, women, and weddings. These embark on an associative dialogue with eight textual fragments taken from several of Mahfouz’ novels.

In the book accompanying the exhibition Mahfouz writes: “This dialogue engages two different cultures with their particular means of expression: the one, steeped in the Oriental tradition of telling, that communicates itself through words, the other, bound to the European tradition of image making, which speak by way of photography .”

Kürzinger’s pictures tell a story of their own. His photos zoom in on subjects that are hardly accessible to a western understanding: Islam as an ever present religious practice and gender interaction. Beyond tourist voyeurism and without flattening out strangeness that often appears exotic Kürzinger succeeds in showing human beings and manages to bring the beholder and the photographed closer to each other. Enthralled be it by their intimacy, be it by their opulence – the pictures attract the beholder to the fascinating world of Egypt.