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.

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.