Making images to make amends

I think it was through Offline that I first learned of the work of Mohamed Hassan, so it was fitting to hear the Egyptian-born photographer talking about his first book Our Hidden Room with Offline editor Brian Carroll. Their conversation took place as part of Saturday's photobook fair at Ffotogallery in Cardiff, though - given that Carroll was the book's designer - the pair have been in dialogue with each other for much longer.

Behind Our Hidden Room stands a tragic tale: Hassan's photographer father, traumatised by his spell in the army, took his own life and, in her furious grief, Hassan's mother burnt his entire archive (prints, negatives and all) and forbade her son from indulging his interest in the art form. When she passed away, he was free from the dutiful obligation to pursue an unwanted career in engineering and came to Wales to study photography.

Our Hidden Room, Hassan explained, is many ways a tribute - an attempt to commemorate his father's passion and to compensate for the destruction of a lifetime's work. As such, it incorporates pictures from family photo albums as well as Hassan's own images taken on return visits to Egypt.

But its creation also turned out to be something of a therapeutic process for Hassan himself, who has suffered with depression too and who admitted that photography has brought about a positive change in him; sharing the fruits of the project has been an unburdening, making him more open in talking about his personal difficulties. Given that (as Carroll suggests) Our Hidden Room is as much about Hassan as it is about his father, and that he now calls Pembrokeshire home, its inclusion of pictures taken in Wales as well as Egypt makes sense.

Our Hidden Room is a reminder that painful memories and intensely personal experiences can be productively channelled into art in a way that can not only help to (re)connect the artist to their subject but also resonate with others.

Beyond the book, the conversation also underlined the power of the picture politically as well as personally. Hassan noted that merely taking photos in cities like Cairo and Alexandria is automatically viewed with suspicion by the authorities and can result in arrest and imprisonment. Even in an age of digital manipulation and AI-generated images, it seems, the camera's capacity to capture what is actually going on persists.