Laura El Tantawy: A Star In The Sea

Born in England to Egyptian parents, photographer Laura El-Tantawy has led a nomadic life. She grew up in Egypt, before studying in America, going on to work for various newspapers, where she first developed her craft as a visual documentarian. After becoming disillusoned with the creative strain that hard news had started to take on her, Laura left her job in search of something much more meaningful. In the years since leaving the news industry behind, Laura has photographed the Egyptian revolution, uncovered consistent suicide amongst Indian farmers and is now using old images from her past to inspire her new project, ‘A Star In The Sea’.

Laura writes about her new body of work ‘A Star In The Sea’...

The project is inspired by a personal experience. It began six years ago with a series of what I perceived at the time as failed polaroids. I travelled with my sx70 camera to the small village of Ronkswood, Worcestershire, where I was born. It was my first time visiting my birth place. I found no physical remnants of the references my parents had given me about the place - the hospital where I was born and the home where they had lived. I thought they were the only remaining connection to my parents. It was a surreal experience in that I felt like I was looking at trees my parents had likely looked at 30 years ago. The failure bit came when I realised my film was expired. There was nothing but a spectrum of colour.

In 2018 I revisited the images at a time when I was meditating on the idea of beginnings and endings. Myself and several in my circle of friends were going through major life shifts, including relationships. The idea that if it’s meant to be, it would be a good companion to get through this hard time. It’s visually different, but conceptually it’s in line with my style of exploring the deeply personal. This comes across in both visual content and words. It will take it’s viewers on an experience. These failed polaroids were a metaphor of how I was felling at the time - I took the photographs with a certain intention in mind, but they turned out otherwise. For a long time I looked at them as a failure, but in fact, they were an unexpected surprise and I felt gratitude for these images. “A Star in the Sea” is a comment on embracing the unexpected.