The French photographer Denis Dailleux took this picture at a wedding in Cairo in 1998. By then, he had been visiting Egypt, obsessively, for six years. His obsession began with a love affair. While working at a florist in Paris, Dailleux met a young Egyptian man, Sherif, and ended up following him back to his home country. Dailleux was intoxicated both by his romance with Sherif and the place and people he encountered. Sherif moved in a rarefied social world, but together he and Dailleux explored Cairo neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Dailleux taking portraits of the people they met, Sherif working as his assistant. Initially, Dailleux worked in austere black and white, but eventually, as he says in an introductory essay to a new book of his Egyptian pictures, “colour imposed itself”.
Though his relationship with Sherif ended, Dailleux continued to live in Cairo, making different series of pictures over a period of 30 years: of veiled mothers and their bodybuilder sons; of the families of those young people who died as martyrs in the Arab spring uprising of 2011; of the evidence of political and environmental decline in the country in the last decade. All the time he was engaged in these projects, though, Dailleux returned to the culture of festivals and celebrations and cafe society that had first entranced him, the Cairo that still carried echoes of A Thousand and One Nights, but with an edge of modern reality. His aim, he suggests, was to get beyond the “myth of exoticism” that Roland Barthes described in Mythologies, to be accepted as an insider.
This picture perhaps reveals the challenge of that ambition. Dailleux’s camera is drawn to the lanterns and coloured lights and tapestries of the wedding feast, but it captures the band during a lull in performance, a moment between moments, as if from behind the scenes.
