Visual Essay: #EverydayNile Correspondences
A reflection on how photos can help us to promote conversations and shared understandings on a long, diverse, and contested river like the Nile.
#EverydayNile is a project involving photojournalists from Nile basin countries to re-picture the river through stories of everyday water practices. The goal is to move away from mainstream media narratives, usually echoing and legitimizing the riparian governments’ official discourses, and representing the river primarily as an issue of national interest and security. Coordinated by InfoNile, under the artistic directions of the Egyptian photographer Roger Anis, #EverydayNile’s initial query was: how can we use photos to elicit a conversation and promote shared understandings about the river across countries?
I found part of the answer to that question thanks to the several photo exhibitions that we organised. Displaying the stories and photos in the same room, and watching and commenting on them together with other people allowed us to acknowledge the existence of different perspectives on water and the river, to compare them, and in some cases to find connections. Indeed “connection” has been a recurrent word in the photographers’ reflections on their work and experience with #EverydayNile. Therefore, last summer, I started playing with the photos of #EverydayNile, recombining them in micro-essays for this blog, to highlight connections across different countries and stories.
Later, I realised that the concept of correspondence could better describe and inspire the practices that unfolded around #EverydayNile stories. Correspondence in the sense of co-responding, or answering together to the same question. But correspondence also in the sense of exchanging from a distance. Anthropologist Tim Ingold theorises human correspondence as a meshwork of individual lifelines that intersect creating knots.
Inspired by this theory, in a recently published visual essay in the journal Visual Studies, I knotted together #EverydayNile photos around specific photographic elements: focus, composition, time, framing, and light. In doing this, this visual essay prefigures how through corresponding we can practice imagination in communication, to create a community engaged in a dialogic conversation on the river as a common, not as a resource that we own, but as a place we belong to.
Thanks to Roger Anis and the #EverydayNile photographers for their constant inspiration, to the InfoNile crew for coordinating the regional and local exhibitions, as well as to Julie Patarin-Jossec for encouraging me to submit the essay to the journal Visual Studies!
You can read the full visual essay in Open Access here:
#EverydayNile has been supported the Water and Development Partnership Program funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The second edition is also supported by GIZ and JRS Biodiversity Foundation and implemented with MiCT and FOTEA.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Emanuele Fantini (September 27, 2024). Visual Essay: #EverydayNile Correspondences. FLOWs. Retrieved November 4, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12djn