A Foreword on Identity
What does it mean to be Egyptian?
What does it mean to have egyptianness?
I aim to ask these questions and answer none.
Part of this project is to better understand my own identity. I don’t have forgone conclusions or final thoughts. I have a point of departure and a series of explorations. Thoughts and veins which go in different directions. Some parallel others tangential others still perpendicular. So much of how I view the world is attached to this duality which I lived with my whole lie. Halfway in America halfway in Egypt. Interestingly I only have a face value understanding of my Egyptian identity. Growing up I ate Egyptian food and went to Egypt every 4 years. It was a very surface level immersion. I understood the struggle of living in a 3rd world country under a dictator and religious oppression only through family. I saw Egyptian culture, art, film, and music only through a limited lens. Like not having glasses while looking at a sign slightly too far away. Always blurry. I never engaged fully; I didn’t know how.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve felt drawn to Egypt. Maybe I want to understands it better to “know where I come from” whatever that means. Maybe I’m drawn to it because I identify it as a thing which sets me apart from others. Something which makes me different. Maybe I’m genuinely interested in the culture. Maybe I fetishize a culture which does not ask to be “researched” or “understood.” Taking advantage of the exotic and foreign as if the culture is obligated to me. As if it owes me something. 
I think it’s a mixture of all these things.

I have a nebulous, undefined visual understanding of my Egyptian identity. Over the years I’ve captured the Egyptian as an individual. The Egyptian King statue, the Egyptian man, soldier, worker. I’ve photographed the natural beauty, the built environment, the large scale modernization and westernization. But it is all in fleeting moments and images. It is all a scratch in the surface of something I don’t claim to really understand. 
Ultimately this project is not a codification of Egyptian cultural identity.
Academic approaches to identity, for me, see identity, so integral to the human experience, in a way which is not reflective of the lived experience of identity. Identity is not simply a series of labels which I and the world understand each other with. Identity is a larger more complicated thing that is understood fully only through lived experience and can only be approximated, not through labels, but through creative enterprise.
This project is one such creative enterprise