CAIROGRAPHIE: Cairo's First Ever Photography and Videography Festival

These days everyone and their mother is a photographer. No one is really sure when this happened, but suddenly anyone with a camera and some time on their hands knows what they’re doing. The time has come to separate the boys/girls from the (wo)men with Cairo’s very first photography and videography festival: Cairographie.

Organised by two of Cairo’s favourite cultural hubs, Darb 1718 and Photopia, Cairographie is set to be the first and biggest annual festival of photography and videography, and it's launching its first edition this November. The festival celebrates both photography and video by bringing together all emerging, mid-career, and established artists to raise awareness of contemporary topics through all forms of photography and video.

Every year, the festival will have a certain theme and this year’s theme is transitions, developed by Cairo-based, and international exhibiting photographer Karim El Hayawan.

“Change is constant. Within the layers, complexity and rapidness of change, transitions occur. Transitions are reflected on us and by us, whether these transitions are inflicted or embraced, resurrected or created. What varies is the impact that transitions incite, both individually and/or collectively," Hayawan says about the event. "Echoing the words of Julian Barnes that ‘art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time.”

This year’s addition of CAIROGRAPHIE will focus on the idea of transition and its bittersweet relation to art - where time intrigues, inspires, and perhaps, unwillingly, defies change, yet crowns time as the true essence of life and the leading force behind all transitions.

The festival will be split up into two parts: a main art exhibition and a rich artistic program of workshops and talks, starting November 5^th through December 9^th.

The Main exhibitions will be organised by Darb 1718 and will open from the 5^th, and the talk, organised by Photopia, will take place every weekend until the end of the festival starting November 9^th.

The talk will cover all kinds of topics from making photobooks, street photography, and personal storytelling by several local and international photographers and videographers.

For more information, check out the Facebook event page here.