Celestial Scapes
Solo Exhibition by Amr Abdul Wahab
April 18 - May 23, 2024
The Photographic Gallery, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, curated Celestial Scapes, an exhibition of astrophotography by the award-winning photographer Amr Abdul Wahab.
Over millennia the cosmos has always been gazed at with wonder and awe by humans. The vastness and distance often evoked mystery, inspired myths, poetry and art, and was even thought to predict the future and misfortune in life. In this relation, the universe has influenced humanity in grounding our collective experience on Earth. The celestial heavens provide us with a measure of time and location, onsetting tides and earthquakes and more.
Abdul Wahab directed his camera and telescope to the sky to open up this world and capture an array of celestial bodies in perpetual motion giving us abstract, divine-like aesthetic visions and striking compositions. These images are beyond human vision and we simply are incapable of glimpsing with our eyes from a vantage point on earth.
The exhibition featured a series of celestial scapes captured from deserts, oases and coastal cities across Egypt. The body of work depicts planets, galaxies, snippets of orbitals, meteors, constellations and interstellar dust recorded through long exposure photography through a complex process that sometimes extends to 48 hours to produce a single image.
The exhibition celebrated the photographer’s career spanning over 10 years and was characterized by trial and error in testing technology in the development of new photographic techniques, finally earning him NASA recognition in 2022, when he won the Photo of the Year award. Abdel Wahab has gone on to work as a photographic consultant for Nikon, Samsung and Optolong in order to test astro-filter prototypes before mass production.
Amr Abdul Wahab
Amr Abdul Wahab is an Egyptian astrophotographer and physicist, with a long academic career before he dedicated himself entirely to astrophotography in 2020. Since 2009, he taught at Cairo University and was a guest lecturer at several universities in Egypt and abroad. He currently serves as the head of the Astronomy Department in the Association of Doctor Mostafa Mahmoud, in Cairo. Abdul Wahab also founded three observatories, ElHayezz and Fayoum in Bahariya Oasis and Wadi El-Rayyan in Fayoum.
In 2010, he founded Astrotrips Collective to share his passion for astrophotography with amateurs and a larger audience in Egypt and the arab world.
Recipient of multiple awards and honorary titles, including the Creative Arab Youth award in 2020, NASA’s Photo of the Year award in 2022 and Best Scientific Photo from the Academy of Scientific Research in Cairo.
