Rehab Eldalil

Published September 2024

What inspired you to become a documentary photographer?

I’ve always been in love with the idea of telling stories with photography. I had my first camera, an analog, when I was 11 years old. I lived in the U.S. as a child for three years and then my parents decided to return to Egypt after 9/11. I needed to understand who am I? The camera was the best way for me to try to make sense of myself in changing spaces while also looking for a space of hope. 

I decided I wanted to major in photography in college and become a wildlife photographer. I had no interest in documentary photography or telling stories of human beings. During my senior year in college in Cairo in 2011, the Egyptian revolution happened. I was an activist, so I participated in the revolution from the early days, when there was no media coverage. I felt I had this responsibility to document what was happening. That was the start of my love of telling stories of people, especially my people. It felt very powerful to start telling this sort of story, about my identity, how we reclaimed our land. 

I read in your artist statement that you’re exploring how to challenge traditional documentary frameworks by developing methods to involve subjects to become participants in the creative process. Could you tell me more about what that looks like in practice?

I started my research about collaboration in 2015. I’ve been working with communities that I either belong to or have a lot of commonalities with. So, it felt weird to be like a parachute photographer coming in, taking photographs from my own perspective and leaving. In 2018, I started my master’s degree in photography focusing on representation in visual storytelling and exoticism of communities like my community within Egypt – the Bedouins of St. Catherine in South Sinai. I also have Palestinian ancestry. Looking into the history of how my community has been represented in visual storytelling has motivated me to look for ways to create autonomy and collaboration with the communities that I’m working with.

I applied my experimentation and research in my long-term project called “The Longing of the Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken.” I invited the community to be part of the creative process by telling me how they would like to be photographed. Most of the previous photography was taken by colonial photographers. So, the stories that came out about the Bedouin community have really impacted their civil rights, because for many years, people thought that Bedouins are these uneducated, aggressive communities, but in reality, they’re actually quite progressive.

Including the community as part of this dialogue helped erase a lot of the influences that I have absorbed subconsciously throughout the years from Western photographers who have photographed Bedouin communities.

Then we elevated the collaboration because I wanted to celebrate the collaborative process visually by inviting the community to have a visual voice within the project. We wanted to use traditional mediums that the community is already familiar with and speaks about their identity. So, the Bedouin women, who are experienced with embroidery, agreed to embroider on their own photographs that I had printed on fabric. Bedouin women have been portrayed as either sexually exotic or submissive, voiceless objects by colonial photographers, so they were hesitant to have their faces shown. But surprisingly, when we started this collaboration, a lot of the women who were intending to hide their identity, decided not to because for them this idea of having power over their images removed this idea of hiding who they are.

That’s amazing. It sounds like part of the importance of that is offering choice.

Exactly, its autonomy. And visually things really became elevated because the men also wanted to be part of that. They write poetry. So, I started collecting handwritten poetry and putting it as the text with images I wanted to depict the meanings of the poetry through. And the older members of the community started to forage plants from the mountain to create a field guide of plants and herbs native to South Sinai, and it became this mixed media landscape project.

What’s also standing out to me is you’re showcasing people’s gifts at the same time as using your own gift.

Yes. Art is humans’ form of expressing who we are. So, it only makes sense, when I invite protagonists to tell this story visually, it should be in a way that they are comfortable expressing their identity, in a familiar medium. 

One of the experimentations that I did early on when I was working on my master’s degree was photographing together collaboratively, but it didn’t work because it was an unfamiliar medium. So whatever images came out, even though they were beautiful, it really did not help them release this sense of expression.

I just released another project called “From the Ashes, I Rose,” where I collaborated with patients who are civilians injured from warfare in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. This was done in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières Italy. I wanted to celebrate the patients’ resistance, how they’re rebuilding who they are. A lot of these patients are children who have lost limbs or have been suffering from severe burns, and you will find these children, with all the pain and agony they have gone through, drawing images. They’re creating things. They’re trying to look for ways to find life. So, the project really celebrates it. And it’s a merger between a workshop I did with them where they drew images of themselves as superheroes and the photography. 

I was very limited in the field because I was working with the mental health department of the hospital and they wanted to make sure my presence didn’t impact new patients. That’s why I used the idea of Polaroid for the first time. Then the patients started using an art therapy method that they were already using in the hospital, the idea of diamond paintings, to add their creative contribution to the work. It’s not something that is related to their identity as they are from across the region, but it’s related to their recovery process, to the invention of who they [now] are.

As you go through the stories, you will really be impressed by some of these interventions because it was done by patients who have severe injuries to their hands. Seeing how they have been able to create these beautiful mosaics on Polaroid, I feel it creates a new perspective of looking at civilians who have been injured in wars, especially wars in our region. Because people think it’s just these number of deaths and they don’t realize the stories and the beauty of the people who are impacted by these wars.

I’m curious about the highlights and challenges of your projects. Especially “The Longing of the Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken,” because it was such a personal project for you.

My father was a war veteran, so he was part of the war retrieving the land back from the Israeli occupation, but he never shared about our Bedouin ancestry. I always felt this spiritual connection with the community. So, when I was in high school and in college, I would go alone to establish this connection. In 2009, I was sitting down with one of the tribe elders, and he was very curious about my last name because it translates to the word “guide.” He’s the one who opened up and told me about our ancestry and that our family moved to another city where my father was born. It gave me a lot of ammunition to confront my father, and he opened up about both our Bedouin and Palestinian sides of the family. The project layers a lot of the things that I was afraid to know about – why would our family hide our ancestry, recreate our identity away from that? And also, where do I belong? That was a very painful question, because I became a lot more interested in being part of the community, partially moving there. I met my husband there and we started a community clinic. But still, it felt weird because I didn’t grow up as a Bedouin. I could never call myself a Bedouin. And that’s where the title came from because I consider myself a stranger even though I’ve been reintegrated into the community. 

Before embracing the idea that I’m going to always be a stranger, I tried to force myself to photograph from only my perspective, and that enforced a lot of the stereotypes, and it didn’t help me embrace my new position within the community. It was a hard challenge. But once I embraced this, that created this liberation where I was open to collaborate with the community to tell the story of the Bedouins from a totally different perspective. And including the community as part of the visual collaboration completely changed my practice because it took me completely away from documentary photography and photojournalism. At one point, I had a lot of reviewers tell me this is not photojournalism. But this is actually the new wave of documentary photography.

The community asked to publish the project as a book because, for them, it became this alternative archive that they are part of. So that was also a big highlight. And thanks to them, I was able to publish the book in 2023.