“Fashion photographers are the new painters,” renowned fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh once said. But in other societies, they aren’t just painters; they’re also storytellers, activists, academics, and historians. They look at fashion more as an art form, exploring multiple socio-political issues such as feminism, identity, and resistance. In Egypt, fashion photography has been rising over the recent years against dramatic social and political shifts that have radically altered the social fabric. From the 2011 revolution to the rise and fall of ex-president Morsi, and now with the current status quo, questions of identity came to very much take hold among the youth, with some starting to define their own independent identity that is quite detached from the social and political context. We see this most evidently on social media, particularly on visual social platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, as it allows young girls and boys to be more exposed to various identities, as well as express their own. Yet there is also a new generation of fashion photographers that are presenting new ways of documenting contemporary reality, and more importantly the identities of young women. Creating an aesthetic out…
