Akkasah, the Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) has released the Samir Farid Collection, 600 never-seen-before photographs from Egyptian cinema.
The Akkasah Center acquired the negatives from a donated collection of the late Samir Farid, a prominent Egyptian writer, scholar, and leading film critic.
The collection features a wide range of negatives taken on sets of various Egyptian films, from publicity shots, to candid pictures of cast and crew, and images captured while filming behind the scenes.
Available on the Center’s website, the collection will present a variety of negatives dated between 1940 and 1990, demonstrating social and historical changes over a fifty year timespan.
Given the fragile nature of these negatives, Akkasah uses the best in industry practice to preserve and digitize these images. The negatives are scanned and then processed, in order to identify the metadata associated with the images, including the films from which they originate, and the actors and directors who appear in them.
Through this painstaking process, the digital archive seeks to preserve photographs that can easily be lost, and ensure the images are available to audiences online for ease of access. To date, the Center has published over 10,000 photographs online via akkasah.org.
The Center contains historical and contemporary collections from the UAE, the Middle East and the wider Arab world, including North Africa.
Akkasah, the Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi, explores the histories and contemporary practices of photography in the Middle East and North Africa from comparative perspectives: it fosters the scholarly study of these histories and practices in dialogue with other photographic cultures and traditions from around the world. Through a range of activities, the center also supports the developing photographic culture in the UAE.
For more information, visit: akkasah.org/
