Chapter 1 treats three of Siqueiros’s politically charged murals of the World War II era: Death to the Invader, completed in Chile in 1942, Cuauhtémoc against the Myth (1944), originally located in Siqueiros’s mother-in-law’s house, which doubled as his Center for Modern Realist Art, and New Democracy (1945), along with the accompanying panels Victims of War (1944/45) and Victims of Fascism (1944/45) at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. These murals are treated in the international context of communist resistance art during and just after World War II, during much of which Siqueiros was in exile after the attack on Trotsky but still in touch with his friends Neruda and Ehrenburg. The murals form a “war trilogy” in which Siqueiros reserved a central role for the Soviet Union even as he negotiated the possibility for nationally specific versions of communist politics to emerge in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The works use the abstract qualities of composition to reveal history in terms of larger structures and forces that appear to transcend the agency of particular people and groups. At the same time, Siqueiros’s representation of the body—often in highly eroticized ways—is very much in keeping with existentially inflected resistance art from the contemporaneous films of Roberto Rossellini to the contemporaneous texts of Italo Calvino, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean-Paul Sartre which tap into the elemental, biological rudiments of human existence as a potential source of revolutionary action.

If Siqueiros’s political murals during the war had taken their energy from the hard edges of military struggle, his murals of 1950–51 had a plastic clarity and monumental directness that represented the painter’s closest approach to orthodox socialist realism. Chapter 2 interprets two murals of this period, painted at the Palace of Fine Arts—The Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc (1950) and The Torment of Cuauhtémoc (1950/51)—along with his Man, Master Not Slave of Technology (1951) painted at the Polytechnic School. The strident dialectical duality and plastic clarity of these murals suggest that Siqueiros was sensitive to the amplified “anti-formalism” campaigns of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. The works emphasize the role of strong individual leadership to the mobilization of the “masses,” which helps explain the resemblance of the heroic human figures in the murals to contemporaneous sculptures of Lenin in the Eastern Bloc. The murals are national in outlook, but envision national resistance movements as dovetailing with Leninist ideas about the nature of revolution. Yet Siqueiros’s brand of socialist realism remained different from Soviet academic models: highly concentrated, dynamic, and committed to a complex understanding of communist ideas about anti-imperialist and the “new man” that were crucial in Marxist cultural production of the period. Cuauhtémoc is an emblem of the organized, anti-imperialist working class and a visual lens through which the proletarianization of the developed world is imagined. Man, Master Not Slave of Technology is similarly pared down and structural in its approach, but introduces to Siqueiros’s work in a new way of the theme of science, which he renders not as a historical force in its own right, but as a tool to be harnessed and controlled by the working class as it makes history.

Chapter 1 critically frames the book to consider how the camera functions to fragment and transform the world. In this way, specific historical moments are made up of events and the relations between them to constitute what deep-rooted cultural forces can be evident in the image. The photographic moment is specific to a particular situation and environment, but at the same time, it retains the subjectivity of the singular perspective, of its own individual creativity. By this singularity and specificity can help determine how the image in Egypt is understood because the relationship between being specific and singular deploys necessary postcolonial concepts to decolonize the history of photography. This chapter aims to build a premise based in photographic criticism and decoloniality theory in order to form a critical lens to project onto this visual heritage. The local photographic archive was informed by the mediation of modernity and this chapter goes on to look into the patina of colonialism in Egypt.

Chapter 2 addresses the pictorial turn in Egypt’s visual history to envision the indigenous uses and potentiality of the medium. Although rarely mentioned by Western art historians, Islamic scholars contributed to the invention of photography and primary among them was Cairo-based Ibn al-Haytham who wrote the scientifically influential Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) in the eleventh century. Through such historical innovations the medium became both a subjective lens and psychological space without set boundaries under an age of Ottoman reform and new-found modernity. One intriguing intersection occurred when Orientalist photography met with indigenous visual traditions through the landscape genre. Foregrounded in the launch of the Daguerreotype, the French painter Horace Vernet and photographer Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet went to Egypt to capture its ancient antiquity. However, the lesser-known work by Egyptian photographer Muhammad Sadiq Bey (1822–1902) consists of images of sacred sites of the Islamic world. This unique photographic history contradicts the commonly held perception that Islam harbours injunctions against human representation or Muslim restraint in regards to the visual arts. Local photographers did much to redress the Eurocentric colonial lens and produce other representations of the landscape that emerge out of different social concerns and aesthetic traditions to transcend dominant visual frameworks.

Chapter 5 deals with female representation as subjects operating under the heteronormative lens that polices Egyptian public space. This includes cultural censorship and the problematic role the Egyptian state continues to play as the patriarchal arbiter of behavioural and moral values. Three diverse image-based works are discussed to consider the regulation of female bodies in the public sphere which have triggered responses to tell us much about censorship and misogyny. The first involves the digital self-portrait of feminist Aliaa al-Mahdy who posted a nude self-portrait on her personal blog in 2011. The image went viral within hours resulting in millions of visits to her website. The second visual work examines doctored fashion photographs on the adlat website, a female online community who offer users tips aligned to conservative Muslim values. A third visual case history examines international books on photography stocked in Cairo bookstores. Such anthologies often include nude artworks as part of the canon of Western art history and this presents a dilemma for the regime. In these editions state censorship has been carried out that entails hand-painting each photographic image to deny the full erotic impact of the body for the public viewer. These three mediated visual case studies are indicative of the entangled expression of gender which appears to demand female representation to be in line with traditional conservative codes. Such expressive tensions, between public and private behaviours, are often part of the stresses many feel within contemporary Egypt which are regularly negotiated through photographic representation.

This final section reconsiders what decoloniality may offer in the context of Egypt. In this sense the photographic image is seen in a new light as a mediation between colonial legacies, nationalist strategies and the potential of decolonializing aesthetics to frame the image as part of a homegrown culture. Moreover, Egypt’s visual culture is a creative expression of its own value codes in the contemporary paradigm, on its own terms, and can authenticate a non-Western visual history which refutes Orientalist trajectories. The book discusses the critical debates on decoloniality theory as a way to rethink local cultural sensibilities and look forward to interpret the forces latent within the photographic image in Egypt.

Having examined the building and decorating of the urban house, this chapter explores how the artisan approached marketing and selling real estate. As the first sustained analysis of property advertising in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, this chapter first considers how regional variations and social demographics (aristocratic audiences in London and Dublin compared with merchant audiences in Boston and Philadelphia) dictated the form and content of property notices, reflecting on issues such as location, quality of structural and decorative finish, convenience and decorum. But while house building and house selling were principally economic activities, representing the motivating force for building mechanics to enter the real estate market, the evidence from property advertisements reveals that builders were cognizant of the semantics of advertising rhetoric and employed a vocabulary that emulated that of auctioneers, luxury goods manufacturers and other polite retailers.

For over three decades, contemporary Bangladeshi artist Dilara Begum Jolly (b. 1961) has critiqued abuses against women, both within her country and globally, through her work. In response to the devastating 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza (an eight-story garment factory in Dhaka that killed over eleven hundred workers) Jolly created a series of highly affective artworks, which are here presented as acts of cultural activism. With their incorporation of workers’ effects Jolly salvaged from Rana Plaza, many of the artworks are haunting and visceral. The artist notes her goal for these works: if strong enough, such a reaction may inspire viewers to buy more ethically and demand grassroots changes, thus transforming her garment factory-themed art into a small but powerful act of resistance to a global system of structural violence.