Matthew Connor's photographic series, Fire in Cairo emerged from Egypt as an oblique and fragmentary document of revolutionary struggle.
The series charts Connors’s uneasy engagement with the political turmoil that gripped the nation during its rapidly unfolding history. The complexity of the situation resisted comprehensive explanation, but invited metaphorical speculation. In his images Cairo reveals itself to be an enormous studio for social change, ripe with visual, sculptural and atmospheric residues of resistance. He weaves these together with portraits of Egyptians from across the political spectrum and his own experimental fiction. The result is a book published by SPBH Editions that careens between reportage, poetry and surrealism to heighten the tensions between beauty, threat and historical consequence. Fire in Cairo was awarded the 2016 ICP Infinity Award. Connors lives and works between Brooklyn and Boston. Since 2004 he has been teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston where he is currently the Chair of the Photography Department.
