Modern Egyptian writers often use literature to comment on contemporary society. Most famous is the novelist Naguib Mahfouz whose Cairo Trilogy portrays family tensions during the period of Egypt’s move towards independence. The Alexandrian film director Shadi Abdel Salam also illustrated the difficulties of defying family codes in his film The Night of Counting the Years about tomb-robbers in Luxor.

In recent years the life and work of an Egyptian artist of Armenian descent, Chant Avedissian, has aroused considerable interest through his striking compositions about society and politics. He was drawn to the work of the architect Hassan Fathy who advocated using local materials and skills for buildings. Avedissian travelled through Egypt photographing traditional crafts and society. He was inspired by the stencilled patterns of the tentmakers and created his art in stencil technique, often based on magazine photographs.

Egypt’s history and contemporary life are the themes of Avedissian’s work. A series of images is set in the years around the 1953 revolution that brought Gamal Abdul Nasser to power. Another subject was the singer Umm Kalthoum, an iconic figure in the performance of Arab music. This nostalgia for stars of entertainment is mixed with scenes of political crises and glimpses of the variety of people, objects and animals making up life in cosmopolitan Cairo.