The real Cairo resisted the detached viewpoint required to represent it as a picture

Evidence

There was a contradiction, therefore, between the need to separate oneself from the world and render it up as an object of representation, and the desire to lose oneself within this object-world and experience it directly; a contradiction which world exhibitions, with their profusion of exotic detail and yet their clear distinction between visitor and exhibit, were built to accommodate and overcome. The problem in a place like Cairo, which had not been built as an exhibition, was to fulfil this double desire. On his first day in Cairo, Gérard de Nerval met a ‘painter’ equipped with a daguerreotype, who ‘suggested that I come with him to choose a point of view’. Agreeing to accompany him, Nerval decided ‘to have myself taken to the most labyrinthine point of the city, abandon the painter to his tasks, and then wander off haphazardly, without interpreter or companion’. But within the labyrinth of the city, where Nerval hoped to immerse himself in the exotic and finally experience ‘without interpreter’ the real Orient, they were unable to find any point from which to take the picture. They followed one crowded, twisting street after another, looking without success for a suitable viewpoint, until eventually the profusion of noises and people subsided and the streets became ‘more silent, more dusty, more deserted, the mosques fallen in decay and here and there a building in collapse’. In the end they found themselves outside the city, ‘somewhere in the suburbs, on the other side of the canal from the main sections of the town’. Here at last, amid the silence and the ruins, the photographer was able to set up his device and portray the city. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 113

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Don DeLillo’s White Noise’s play between representation and experience, and connects to the reader’s interest in how spaces refuse or accommodate being turned into spectacle.
• SEED: An essay angle: how un-designed urban spaces resist the ‘picture’ that exhibitions and colonial description impose on them — a parallel to today’s Instagram-ready city corners.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a city not built as an exhibition cannot satisfy the double demand of detachment-plus-immersion is dense and far-reaching — representation requires a vantage that the real, lived place withholds.