The final chapter looks at the visual approaches of innovative photographic art practices in Egypt. These art photographers remain marginal and the dubious nature of the state’s interference in cultural affairs has impeded the development of a sustainable ecosystem of creative contemporary art practices. Many photographic artists operate with nuanced forms of personal expression, manipulating images and thinking beyond the direct image object itself. This generation of photographic artists have emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, and set out to create dialogue on cultural representation, identity and photographic aesthetics. The selection of art photography projects examined in this chapter consists of the work of two practitioners, Nadia Mounier and Ibrahim Ahmed, who are indicative of the indigenous reimagining of Egyptian visual culture. This generation has much to say about the state of the nation and patriarchal power, as the personal can become political. These artists constitute a contemporary wave of local image-makers who are rethinking Western narratives on the medium to look both outwards and inwards, capturing life among Egypt’s sprawling cities. Art photography holds a mirror to the globalized nature of modernity, colonial pasts and the emancipatory potential of image cultures vividly felt during 2011.

The Introduction explains Siqueiros’s significance, briefly sketches his biography, and states the main arguments of the book. Siqueiros used avant-garde visual innovations tactically to create a modernist aesthetic that blended monumentality and estrangement. His internationalism was based on a Marxist world view that saw the national liberation of oppressed peoples as dovetailing with the global ambitions of the communist movement. While Siqueiros remained loyal to the Soviet Union in the later part of his career, his artworks straddled the line between reformist and orthodox Marxism as his iconography drew on democratic working-class traditions and dramatizations of Soviet power. His work of the early 1950s was his most monumental and represented his closest approach to Socialist Realism. His work of the late 1950s, by contrast, was much more agitational and much more interested in representing a popular, emancipatory politics in line with the reformist impulses of de-Stalinization. His work of the 1960s was more elegiac: a profound rumination on the history of the global working class during a time of both hope and pessimism for the painter and his comrades in France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

The conclusion deals with some of the very thorniest questions of Siqueiros’s mural production. Siqueiros was indeed at times authoritarian. He never wavered in his support of a Soviet Union that was increasingly seen by progressive communists as an unsalvageable shill for Stalinism; he had a “star” position within the communist art world of the time that gave him privileges unavailable to the working class he sought to represent. Yet, the murals of his late career are highly valuable. They dramatize the need for organization, leadership, and analysis as core components of an effective left-wing politics. They never descend into the kind of theoretical solipsism that began to characterize Marxist debate in the academy in the 1970s. They were unfailingly attentive to the travails of the global working class and, as such, create a kind of dialogue with the dead meant as a productive spur to revolutionary political action. They stand as a testimony to the one-time power of the organized, international, communist movement which in many contexts—and despite its many problems—served as a progressive political force. Thus, they stand too as an emblem of the massive cultural and political gap that separates Siqueiros’s time period from our own, in which progressive politics lacks a coherent center and seems too often to fail at the day-to-day work of political organization based on a rationally arrived at program.

Chapter 6 treats Siqueiros’s History of Theater and Cinematography in Mexico (1959), painted at the Jorge Negrete Theater and not yet complete upon Siqueiros’s arrest in 1960. Like the other two murals from the late 1950s, the work stands somewhat closer to reformist strands of Marxism, again through references to Mexican anarchist traditions, but also in the media critique the work exacts. Painted at the dawn of the television age, the mural, in dialogue with Siqueiros’s Spanish–Mexican Marxist acquaintance Adolfo Sánchez-Vázquez, mourns the fading possibilities of a truly democratic media sphere in which the masses create theater and film growing from their own everyday lives and seeks to resurrect the possibility of such a sphere by pointing to the radical theater of the Mexican Revolution. The dead worker depicted in the mural comes to represent the death of media democracy as the painting depicts the capitalist degeneration of working-class culture. This loss of what Sánchez-Vázquez called, “truly popular culture,” is a tragedy that runs in tandem with the tragedy of the striking railroad workers, depicted in the mural being beaten down by federal goons. The result, here, is that the anarchist penchant for direct action appears less heroic than at Chapultepec, as a premature attempt at agitation meets with failure.

Chapter 4 follows the street activism during the 2011 period through online digital platform projects. These vernacular images enabled new understandings of cultural politics to visualize the revolutionary hope of emergent grassroots movements. Two archival projects, 858: Archive of Resistance and Filming Revolution, are innovative online media works which corroborate the historic visual legacy of collectivist thinking in an unconventional archival way. These media projects set out to counter the best efforts of the military regime to detract from the popular memory of political dissent and civil disobedience during this revolutionary time. Cairo video collective Mosireen (Determined) were indicative of this activist spirit within the visceral street atmosphere of 2011. Filming Revolution is a multi-layered, meta-documentary media work developed by filmmaker and academic Alisa Lebow with content drawn from interviews, films, artworks and other digital materials. Both archival projects preserve digital memory to offer a counter-narrative to the governmental propaganda disseminated on the mainstream media. These online works contextualize the recent memory of emancipation during times of revolution and call into question the values, codes and ethics of the digital image in the documentation of struggle. These projects warrant careful consideration because they move beyond chronotropic readings of the digital image alone to embody the activist potential of the photographic document. They represent the marginal in the reproduction of new knowledge in this non-linear treatment of history.

The death of Stalin in 1953, the suppression of a workers’ uprising in East Germany and the continued ill-fortunes of the PCM initiated a period of transition and contradiction in Siqueiros’s work ied in Chapter 3. That sense of transition was increased by the long, complicated process of finishing the only two major state mural commissions of 1952–56: For the Complete Safety of All Mexicans at Work, at the Hospital de la Raza, and The University to the People, the People to the University on the rectory building at the UNAM campus. In these works, Siqueiros tipped the scales of his tactical modernism back toward the experimental and dynamic. Capitalism is represented as an expressionist machine for the manufacture of dead bodies, while humanoid figures are rendered in a futurist idiom that gives visual expression to notions of labor as theorized by Lenin, and by Henri Lefebvre in Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, written while Lefebvre was still the leading intellectual in the firmly PCF. Siqueiros mobilized the technique of polyangularity to signal the necessity for a close relationship between proletarian action, education, and worker safety. However, rigid bifurcation and a strong sense of direction remained key aspects of the compositions, retaining and expressing the mechanical view of history characteristic of orthodox Marxism and envisioning proletarian leadership in terms of Leninist ideas. That view was tempered by an iconography that envisioned democratic, working-class control of the means of production revealed Siqueiros’s continued interest in the syndicalist political model and foreshadowed his return to a more agitational aesthetic in his murals of the late 1950s.

Chapter 4 treats From Porfirianism to the Revolution (1957/66), Siqueiros’s large-scale mural at the Museum of National History, which was more directly agitational in its forms and iconography than the works of the late 1940s and early 1950s and placed much greater emphasis on the role of direct action and self-organized working-class agency, a quality that brings the work tentatively into the orbit of New Left de-Stalinization, especially in the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). Siqueiros had numerous friends in the PCI, including Guttuso and Zavattini, whom he visited in the fall of 1956, just before starting work on the mural. Yet the work’s portrait detail and panoramic sweep allow for interpreting it, in part, as an example of so-called “critical realism,” a sub-version of socialist realism that was hotly debated in nearly all communist parties in the period during which Siqueiros was conceiving and working on the mural. In addition, the work’s references to anarchist traditions in Mexico make it somewhat less orthodox and Soviet-oriented than the works of the 1944–55 period.

Chapter 3 considers how the use of photography was popularized through the illustrated magazine industry to shape collective belonging and influence the cultural imagination of an emergent nation-state. Various types of visual magazines flourished in the early twentieth century and these collections recorded and shaped the transformation of everyday life under modernity. Illustrated magazines, like al-Musawwar (The Photographer’s Studio), used photographs in new graphic ways to report on news, culture and celebrities in order to reflect the interests of its middle-class readership. Hence, the photograph in print takes on a persuasive role in mediating new social values and the nationalist politics of a country moving from colonial to decolonial self-rule. Later, the Nasserist Arab Republic nationalized the media and the state inherited various photographic archives while struggling to set up institutions that could safeguard the medium. These surviving magazine archives help position the role of the photograph in the popular press as they are often archived in government-run institutions or by independent organizations. The preservation of image materials has become contentious as the housing in archives brings into question the curation of cultural memory, autonomy of knowledge and the unlearning of colonial legacies.

The introduction summarizes the main argument and theoretical content for the following themed chapters as each one unfolds a particular critical focus to read of bodies of visual materials formed in Egypt. The book sets out to ask fundamental questions of the medium in a challenge to the dominance of Western-led photographic history to present another genealogy of the visual in Egypt by posing the following questions:1. How has this visual heritage constituted its own sensibility of photographic history?2. In what ways did local photographic practices respond to the impact of Western modernity?3. In what ways have local traditions shaped indigenous photographic practices and how have cultural forces used the medium?4. How has popular engagement with and use of the visual brought about an awareness of image politics?The picture of Egypt has been fiercely contested and often mythologized within its own nationalist notions for far too long. Moreover, the meaning of photographs cannot be anchored down easily or pigeonholed into uncomplicated and, arguably, unrepresentative narratives. Decolonizing Images sets out to develop a vision on the local, indigenous genealogy of the photographic heritage of Egypt and, in doing so, continues the essential practice of edifying the history of photography.

Apology for the Future Victory of Medical Science over Cancer (1958), the subject of Chapter 5, painted at the oncology hospital in Mexico City's Centro Médico, was produced as part of a tentative dialogue about reformist Marxism and about the role of Marxism outside the Soviet Union. In its composition and iconography, Siqueiros poses a dialectic of technology and society that charts a middle course between the apocalyptic view of modern systems found in Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and the utopian technophilia of post-Stalinist culture in the Soviet Union. The mural is quite frank in its depiction not only of the horrors of cancer cells themselves but also of the machinery used to detect them. The radioscopy machine depicted is fearsome looking, inducing feelings of alienation even as it is meant to banish fear. Through the relationship of machines to figures in the painting, Siqueiros seeks to present technology not as a symbol of universal progress but as a tool to be instrumentalized democratically by mobilized masses for their own benefit. The mural's depiction of the unevenness of modernization processes as created by capital makes it a more reformist Marxist vision than was usual for Siqueiros. In addition, its representation of an anti-imperialist group of doctors working in tandem with peasants indicates an increase in Siqueiros's attention to rural contexts and a flirtation with the less dogmatic leftism of the non-aligned movement at a time when Siqueiros was in contact with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Upon his release from prison, Siqueiros completed work at Chapultepec, received the Lenin Peace Prize in the Soviet Union, and began work on a large-scale mural project that was to become The March of Humanity (1966/71), installed at the Polyforum complex in Mexico City. The mural, the subject of Chapter 7, was an articulation, with a broad and emotion-laden view of twentieth-century history, of the crisis of Marxist politics in Mexico and globally. It combines the emotional force of leftist existentialism, associated with Jean-Paul Sartre to whom Renau compared Siqueiros, with the analytical force of Marx’s method of historical materialism. The work is suffused with Siqueiros’s socialist humanism which in some respects, unlike the works of the late 1950s, de-emphasized class struggle and returned to abstracted allegories of larger historical structures. In its kaleidoscopic iconography of suffering, revolution, and cosmic hope, the mural does not foreclose on possibilities for radical change, but defers those changes to a distant future. The work is also concretely social, its iconography drawn from an attempt to convey the historical significance of contemporary events such as the Vietnam War, the prospect of atomic destruction, the pervasiveness of corruption, and the then-recent traumas of World War II and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the work is a kind of memorial to the working class and, in many respects resembles the great modernist war and holocaust memorials of the Eastern Bloc, which Siqueiros appreciated on his trips to East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union during the late 1960s.