In Spaces, Beginnings and Memories
On Spaces of the Intimate:
The works of Romany Hafez
The works of Romany Hafez on Siegfried Kracauer, in his thesis about the photographer’s capacity to be able to register the spatial imprint of people, conditions and events, proposed that a photograph leads to the eradication of memory rather than its extension, and has demolished or removed en route the viewer’s ability to perceive “the real”. This was proposed in 1927 , and photography, through the early development of its process, was exclusively in black and white; reality existed in photography solely in black and white.
Romany Hafez takes Kracauer’s argument as a starting point to explore notions of the real: real spaces that are inhabited by people, conditions and events, that in fact always continue to vibrantly exist every minute of the day.
The photographer’s decision to “register” – using Kracauer’s term — spaces devoid of their people leaves the viewer partially perplexed: we do not see people, but only traces of evidence that someone has lived – or perhaps still lives — here? In Hafez’s works there will never be a full answer, as the perfectly shot and printed architecture demonstrate perfection of the scene, almost like a well set and prepared film prop, ready for shooting the next scene, or right after a day of filming.
The spaces here are indeed as Krucauer proposes, they succeed in annulling the perception of time, an essential element in perceiving and judging “the real”, as reality requires the essential blend of space and time. Hafez succeeds in establishing his own version of reality, rather a “hyper-reality” proposed by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his seminal text Simulacra and Simulation back in 1994.
This state of hyperreality is a special kind of social reality in which it is created or simulated from models, or defined by reference to models. This is in fact a reality generated from ideas. With everything exisiting on the surface and without mystery, it becomes more “real” than the reality of the actual spaces that Hafez captured. This becomes too perfect and schematic to be true, as if in cinematic post-production special effects, this is a type of retouching that Hafez never approaches or uses.
The viewer experiences each photograph as more real than the actual real: as all boundaries between real and imaginary are –somehow — compromised, and becomes a ‘real’ without ‘origin or reality’, yet the viewer can enjoy and can easily connect to.
Hafez forces us to leave reality behind, and no longer read the former reality and distinguish it from the hyperreality in his pictures. Will reality return? In such a journey, Romany Hafez guides us to his realms of intimate spaces, both physical and written in diaries. The secret gardens, places and spaces he walked in and inhabited and portrayed are all real, felt and have an emotional connection,.
Like a great chef, Hafez's presentation is like a secret recipe that combines the raw ingredients with the carefully seasoned and spiced.
Khaled Hafez
Cairo, 2017
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