The "Free People" and the Palestine Crisis at the Sony Gallery this Year

The glory of the Berbers (the Imazighen or "free people") was reflected in a joint exhibition by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library, with a display Imazighen silver jewelry, and the Sony Gallery, which showed a collection of old postcards from the Maghrib published by veteran Cairo publishing house Lehnert and Landrock and its contemporaries.

Entitled "Berber!", the joint exhibition showed different aspects of Imazighen culture and raised questions as to the identity and origin of the Berbers.

Dramatic moments of the crisis in Palestine were also captured in shows this year. "Palestine: Women and Children First" by John C. Tordai, a London-based freelance photojournalist, provided a glimpse into the lives of Palestinian women and children over the past few years. The theme of the exhibition, as Graham Usher notes in his introduction to the catalog, was of "women pondering the fate of their offspring: of another generation whose history has been taken and whose future is as perilous as their past."

The last moments in the life of Baghdad before the bombs began to fall in March 2004 were portrayed in a show by Associated Press photojournalist Amr Nabil. When Nabil returned to Baghdad in September 2002, he was already on edge, expecting a war any time. But after a few days, as he describes, "I discovered that while I was wracked by tension, life all around me went on…. It looked like the Iraqis had been waiting for decades for this or that attack." The pictures showed the daily private life of the Iraqis "who were convinced war is coming and who until that moment were determined to live their lives as best as they can."

When the attack on Iraq was finally launched more than two dozen photographers covered the war for the Associated Press. The Sony Gallery exhibited the work of sixteen of those photographers. Their mission was both to capture instant news and make a document for the historical record.

By Nura Bahgat