Cairo Photo Week: Activating the Image—Thinking with Family Photographs by Kegham Djeghalian and Özge Calafato

Centered around family photographs as cultural objects with specific affective materialities, this workshop will explore questions such as personal and collective memory, social and cultural identity, citizenship/non-citizenship, transnational mobilities, modernity and colonial histories.

In an intensive four-day workshop, the participants will be asked to delve into their family archives and choose a set of photographs (1-10 images) to work with. In the first part of the workshop, we will urge the participants to reflect on the question of ‘archive’ itself – What does it mean to archive, what does it mean to document the past and the present? How do photographs contribute to the making of personal, familial and collective narratives? How can we think about archiving our own history? What does it mean to activate an archive?

Around these questions, in the second part of the workshop, we will specifically reflect on how family photographs speak back, and how we can listen to what they are telling us. What do family photographs say about our own social and cultural identity formation, as well as our histories of mobility, migration, and trauma What are the processes of memory-making that family photographs are part of? How do they contribute to a sense of belonging and healing? How do they reproduce or subvert the construction of certain identity representations, what do they include, what do they exclude? Through this workshop, we will also investigate what a ‘family photograph’ constitutes, reflecting on the notion of "family" itself.

The chosen photographs can be digital, prints or negatives, prompting discussions on the materiality of photography. We also consider their audience and circulation, examining how these may have changed over time.

As an outcome of the workshop, the participants will be given several options to choose from to produce artistic work based on the group discussions and the family archive they worked with. This final production may include photography, film, a written piece, a design object or a mixed media art piece.

We will conclude the workshop with a public session where the participants will present their work in a short presentation.

Recognizing the various scales of intimacy and care embedded in this practice, through this workshop, we hope to offer a compelling method for developing new ways of thinking about connected social histories and open up new conversations about erasure, loss, remembrance, heritage, and resistance.

**The workshop is offered as part of the Cairo Photo Week program, which will be held in Downtown Cairo from May 8 to May 18, 2025.

Time and Date

May 10 I 5 pm - 8 pm: Presenting, contextualizing, and kicking off the workshop.

May 16 I 11 am - 5 pm: Workshop

May 17 I 10 am - 5 pm: Workshop

May 18 I 9 am - 3 pm: Workshop

May 18 I 3 pm - 5 pm: Public presentation of workshop projects
 

Fees: Free Admission
(2 reserved spots for AUC students)

Registration