r/Africa • u/TheContinentAfrica • 2d ago
Picture 📸 When absence takes hold
Words and photos: Fatma Fahmy
Lake Qarun in Egypt’s Fayoum region formed about 70,000 years ago – one of the oldest lakes in the world. Fast-forward several thousands of years to when pharaonic-era engineers developed it into a reservoir by constructing canals to increase the flow of water.
In more recent history, the lake used to provide a livelihood for the people of Ezbet Soliman and nearby villages. It was a watery portal to love, companionship, and a whole way of life.
Over the past decades, that portal has slowly closed. When the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1970, the lake’s connection to the Nile River was cut.
The resultant increased salinity, untreated sewage, and agricultural runoff, polluted the water. Fish disappeared and the shoreline receded.
It felt as if closing the portal had left the community suspended between two worlds: land that had lost its water, and souls still searching for life.
This kind of environmental exploitation leaves its deepest marks on women. They are often the first members of a community to feel the pain when
nature collapses, but the last to abandon the land where they live.
In systems built on control and not care, women are left to carry the burden alone – they are the final bridge between crumbling land and its people. They are rarely seen as part of the solution.
But women’s stories are not important only for the suffering they surface. They are a way in – to understand how people hold grief and memory through place.
At its heart, the ecofeminist visual project When Absence Takes Hold asks: What is our relationship with the places we’ve lost? How do we carry memory in our bodies, in our gestures, in the silence we inherit? If you could write a letter to nature, what would you say?
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u/wasthespyingendless Non-African - North America 1d ago
Here is Fatma's website if you want to see the actual stories: https://www.fatmafahmy.com/stories
Some great work there.
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u/uhbuquetteophuket 1d ago
All of these should be in r/accidentalrenaissance! & their stories told by these images are so beautiful
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