Amr Alfiky: Recording Memories

text and images by Amr Alfiky

On May 29, I grabbed my camera and headed to Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, where there was a large demonstration to protest the death of George Floyd. A few minutes after my arrival, I found myself amongst a confrontation between police and protestors that lasted for hours. At first I felt disoriented. I didn’t know where I was. Was I in the U.S. or was I in Egypt? Things unfolded before my eyes in a blur. I continued photographing the protests, only to finally realize that in doing so, I was reliving memories from 2011. 

My interest in photography began in an uprising. During the Egyptian Revolution, I was a medical student at Alexandria University. It was on the frontline, working in a makeshift field hospital for injured protestors, that I recognized the importance of documenting and distributing images in real time to inform the world of what was happening. 

In American exile, I pursued this new passion and with the support of friends and mentors, I was able to establish a career in photojournalism. I’ve covered a wide array of stories over the years, but I never imagined that on American soil I would witness similar scenes to those engraved in my memories from Egypt.