How Egypt Looks to the World: A Talk with Getty Images’ Rebecca Swift

When Rebecca Swift speaks about images, she’s not talking about pixels and resolutions. She’s talking about power - who holds it, who shapes it, and what stories make it past the gatekeepers.

As Senior Vice President of Creative Insight at Getty Images, one of the largest and most influential visual media archives in the world, Swift has spent her career studying the mechanics of representation: who gets seen, how they’re portrayed, and what that visibility means.

This week, she was in Cairo as part of Cairo Photo Week - a city-wide celebration of photography and visual culture that’s become a key meeting ground for emerging creatives from across the region. Speaking to CairoScene during her visit, Swift reflected on the unique energy of Egypt’s creative community and the importance of platforms like Getty evolving to better reflect the richness of underrepresented perspectives.

“There’s a hunger here,” she noted. “A boldness in how Egyptian photographers and visual storytellers are showing the world who they are - and who they’ve always been.”

For decades, Egypt has often been viewed through a narrow, orientalist lens - pyramids, poverty, revolution. But the new wave of creators is shifting that. They’re capturing Cairo’s street style with the same reverence once reserved for ancient monuments. They’re documenting joy, nuance, absurdity, softness. And perhaps most importantly, they’re doing it on their own terms.

Getty Images, long regarded as the global default for editorial and commercial visual media, is increasingly opening space for these perspectives. Through contributor outreach, partnerships, and narrative-driven briefs that center local authenticity, the platform is re-examining what ‘stock’ should look like - and who it should speak for.

Swift acknowledged that while progress has been made, the work of rebalancing representation is ongoing. It’s about Egyptian creatives taking back authorship and deciding how their culture is framed on the global stage. For a country that has always been photogenic, perhaps the next frontier is not being seen - but being seen accurately.