Laura El-Tantawy

Laura El-Tantawy was born in England to Egyptian parents, lived in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the US before returning to the UK where she currently lives and works. Having spent her life moving between East and West, her work portrays an intimate and emotive visual exploration of rootlessness. Her first publication, In the “Shadow of the Pyramids”, shared a personal and emotionally charged perspective of the Egyptian revolution, awarded Best Photobook at the 2015 Fotobookfestival in Kassel, Germany. Picking up where her previous book left off, “Beyond Here is Nothing” is equally poignant but retreats from the public sphere into a private world, where the mental burden of loneliness and the constant search for belonging presents itself in the form of ambiguous visuals, ominous shadows, and subtle textures. El-Tantawy’s haunting imagery confronts the viewer with their own feelings of not belonging, but also with the beauty of it.