When Night Falls – Aalam Wassef

When
Night Falls

In 2017, three years after his arrest by the police of a country that shall remain unnamed, the effects of intimidation ceased to influence Aalam. Yet, despite this, the bans on photographing and filming in the streets continued to deprive him of his practice and subject: representing the consequences of dictatorship on the living conditions of his contemporaries — a truth that totalitarian regimes strive to suppress.

To create this series, Aalam designed his own hidden-camera modules: one placed at ground level inside a simple paper bag, and another mounted at mid-height in a discreet box fixed to his bicycle. Both were remotely controlled through a smartphone on the handlebars — a system refined over twelve months to avoid any concession to censorship through blurred or poorly framed images.

With this device, Aalam photographed people sleeping in the streets of Cairo: workers who have come from the countryside to seek a living, and city dwellers caught in a quiet but brutal slide toward social displacement. Pavements, bus stops, and street corners become temporary bedrooms — fragile refuges between sky and concrete.

Captured in a city where the hopes of a once-resounding uprising have faded into silence, these images echo the works of Weegee, Paz Errázuriz, and the poetic desolation of Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den. The series is dedicated to Erich Salomon, whose inventive photographic devices inspired the technical imagination behind it.

When Night Falls reveals a Cairo that persists beyond daylight: intimate, exposed, and deeply human.