Photographer Mohamed Mahdy Wins Premi Mediterrani Albert Camus Award

Acclaimed Egyptian photographer Mohamed Mahdy has been awarded the bi-yearly Premi Mediterrani Albert Camus (PMAC) ‘Incipiens’ award for his project, ‘Here, The Doors Don’t Know Me’. The prize is awarded to a single person every two years in recognition of emerging careers in journalistic reflection. Amongst the other two nominees for the award was fellow Alexandrian, photographer Sara Younes, for her project ‘At a Peter Pan Moment’, as well as Libyan multimedia artist Tewa Barnosa, nominated for her project ‘Written not to remain’.

Mahdy’s work, and this project in particular, has already received international acclaim, winning the Open Category of the World Press Photo Awards in February 2023, as well as the Magnum Foundation Social Justice Fellowship in 2021. His previous project, titled ‘A Place To Begin’, was also exhibited at AUC Tahrir’s Cultural Centre in September 2023.

Over five years of documentation between 2016 and 2021, culminating in ‘Here, The Doors Don’t Know Me’, Mahdy sought to amplify the voices of people under threat of displacement in his hometown, the Al Max neighbourhood of Alexandria. Once known as the ‘Venice of the Middle East’, the area was home to a thriving fishing community, supplying many of Alexandria’s best seafood restaurants, as well as the neighbourhood’s own eateries. However, since April 2020, the village has been subject to mass bulldozing. In that month alone, 1,500 families were displaced as machinery razed a third of the village, including over 200 houses that lined the town’s picturesque canal.