Gamal Nkrumah struggles in order to take a dispassionate look at the insane insider information glimpsed by Nermine Hammam The depth and intensity of the empathy Nermine Hammam's photographs of the psychotic patients she befriends inspires in the onlooker is a little frightening. Much of the unease is due to the photographer's insistence on projecting the inner state, the injured souls of her subjects. Rather than the bohemian outsider, she becomes the infiltrator, a participant observer, and a friend of the friendless. She even took her teenage daughter, Leila, along. This daring move gave her exhibition its intellectual ballast. Whose reality is it anyway? I am drawn by her thinking woman's approach to taking photographs. Hammam has an amazing eye. When she turns her gaze to the gesticulation or hand movement of a mad person, she is also looking at herself. Her revulsion against the costs of insanity -- physical and emotional -- is powerfully conveyed. There was madness in the air. "The nurses were just as mad, if not madder than the patients in the mental asylum. I consider myself extremely lucky to have met and mingled with those relegated to madness," she tells me with affable humility. Hammam hunts down a copy of Susan Sontag's On Photography and reads a line aloud. "To collect photographs is to collect the world." She leafs through Sontag's classic and reads aloud some more. "What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of relevant political consciousness." Coolly elegant in a simply cut white blouse, matching white jumper, slacks and trainers, Hammam exudes an irony and humour that instantly captures her laconic aesthetic. Her manner is as sober and deliberate yet also as laid-back as her photographs of the insane. How do her images and ideas arrive? "I see something, I hear something. I am moved by that something." Picture a 65-year-old matron who imagines she is a bride of 25 preparing for her betrothal to a brute, bedecked in bridal white. Instead of being joined in wedlock to her beloved, she was jilted, succumbed to a deep depression, lost her composure and ended up in a mental asylum. She peers at herself in a photograph taken by a newfound friend, remembers her paramour, the groom-to-be, her unrequited love and the jilted fuddy-duddy she has turned out to be, and she shrieks in horror: "That is not me." Unbeknown to the photographer, her fusspot of a friend had no access to mirrors for more than four decades. Hammam has a way of questioning things. The visual slapstick hits home. How the hell can she understand that time is cruel, that her life was a lie? The truth is that time is her tormentor. It may seem a prosaic way to call time on a dream first given voice over nuptial vows that never were. Hammam captures that visual noise on camera. Her photographs fly in the face of the image overload of contemporary Cairo. The world of the insane in a mental asylum is "deeply away from the rest of Cairo, the rest of the world." And yet it is an intrinsic part of that world, that very city. The secluded, the concealed or hidden, is inextricably intertwined with the openly seen and perceptibly understood. "The whole thing isn't about individuals. These people aren't as mad as you think." Few people hate to fall in love, but many love to hate. There is something unsettling about Hammam's portraits of patients in a mental asylum. The nurses love to hate the patients, the patients fall in love with the nurses and with intruders such as Hammam. This is perhaps why it is therapeutic to try and catch up with her prescient, pertinent vision of the deranged at play. Few patients who venture in come out sound and sane. Yet one can see clearly from the expressions of Hammam's subjects' facial expressions evoking the exclamation of a people resigned to their fate. She stuck white patches, strips of plaster as it were, over their eyes. The viewer never sees these people's eyes. Perhaps this was her way of protecting their privacy. "I am not sure I like to be branded with the label artist." Hammam is more of an explorer, a mental entrepreneur. Last summer she took her husband and the twins to Peru. "It was a gratifying experience wandering in the jungles of the Amazon Basin in northern Peru. I met a shaman..." Her train of thought is abruptly cut short. Simplicity, passion and an eagerness to please drive the exhibition. The madness is mischievously captured on camera. The easy familiarity of mad subjects posing for an unconventional photographer conveys the illusion of the surreal. But then Hammam asks me rhetorically: "What is the nature of reality? What is this concept of what's real? I tried to explore the possibility of whether a photograph can capture what is the reality, the state of consciousness, of someone designated insane." In part, it is a question of moral aptitude. "As a child I used to pass by mental hospitals. I was raised in Zamalek, but I was fascinated by these strange places with nurses in white robes. I was curious as to why grown-ups thought these places were something of an abomination. Why were mental asylums so scary? I was searching for answers." Mental asylums can be hell. She quotes Sontag again. "Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as simply unreal or as a demoralising emotional blow." She does not see herself as a career photographer, but taking photographs has required regular interjections of incident, circumstance and serendipity. Not focusing on uncomfortable questions may result in the odd satirical swipe that is passably funny. Hammam seized rarified states of rapture. The mental asylums are replete with rules and regulations. If the rules were the same, patients and nurses would have been able to commune in blissful co-existence. But the world is not fair, at least not these people's world. The viewer can easily hear the mental patient's anguish and pain. The focus on feelings is much more stringent than the everyday banality of the mundane and seemingly meaningless lives of the insane. Some photographs of the insane on display are instantly discernible, witty versions of peculiarly Egyptian insanity. Insaneness has long had a powerful hold on the Egyptian imagination. Almost any encounter with mad people will have one hairy moment. Hammam's moment of truth came when an elderly patient wanted to hug her. "Hygiene is zero in that place. Patients involuntarily pee on themselves. Nurses take the piss." Hammam took the plunge. She held her breath and gave the patient a big hug. She had been in the asylum for nearly 50 years and deserved better. "Naturally, they feel good when someone cares for them, and takes an interest in them." Hammam, however, was in for a host of unpleasant surprises. She wasn't prepared for the patients' mood swings. "Their madness sucked me in." It is unquestionable that it is shocking when you first see a mad person taking a mud bath in the grounds of the asylum, oblivious to all else. It is much worse when others join in. Perhaps she had memories of a rugby scrum. So what motivated her to capture those mad moments? Her explanation was prosaic. "When my daughter and I first approached them, I saw three patients sprinting to get out of the way, certain we were going to hit them. I took a deep breath." Her reaction to her mad friends was disingenuous. "At one point I wasn't quite sure who was mad, me or the mental patients." She took 11,000 photographs of her mentally disturbed friends in the asylum. Only 55 of these are on show at the Townhouse Gallery, downtown Cairo. "We have to look at the darker side of ourselves. I don't want to take photos of flowers," Hammam exclaims. Mental patients lead a miserable existence devoid of human dignity -- ragged, wrecked and raw. Yet there is an inner dignity in their defiance of filth, in their perseverance in the face of adversity and humiliating, inhuman abuse. Even the symbol of matriarchy is abused. The differences between the sexes being played out in the corridors of the insane asylum are captured in a small repertoire of gestures. The exhibition at the Townhouse contains an assortment of the highs and lows that continue to make madness as garish a subject as sickness and death. Yet I for one fell under the spell of her digital camera. And so did one of Egypt's most distinguished psychiatrists, Nasser Louza. "In Egypt, these patients were traditionally seen as blessed, hence the word majnoon or 'inhabited by the jinn'. But their position has fallen after this this accommodating society gave way to a culture of intolerance." A madman can still be seen not as an object of pity, however, but as the abode of some celestial being. To stay true to that thought, Hammam searched for kindred spirits among the mad men and women of the mental asylum in Abbasiya. "I spent many months taking photographs of couples," she muses. It was a rite of passage. Her photographs convey the intricacies of the cruel confinement and the bonding between the patients yearning for loving affection. They demonstrate that the patients brave a humane drama not of their own making. Her work is courageous. "We have built asylums for these patients, consequently removing them from our culture and relieving our communities of their responsibility to care for and integrate the developmentally disabled into everyday life." The irony was that the censors deemed some of her photographs subversive. Hammam, according to them, has done her country a great disservice by depicting the ugly underbelly of society. She studied the undesirables and hugged the untouchables of our country. Even the very symbol of authority is abused by the audacity of the work. That is if you believe the censors. Hers is one of the first of a series of conduits to curtail or contain our cruelty. It is one of the first of practical initiatives designed to improve the lives of the insane in Egypt, on earth. Menatonia, a term defined as profound and often spiritual conversion, captures Hammam's personal encounter with some of the patients. "I spent more time not taking pictures, more time adjusting to the space," the photographer extrapolates. "I understood that as humans we can be so incredibly cruel to one another. I watched the nurses, who abused their authority, treating the patients with complete insensitivity, totally disregarding their humanness." Menatonia is on display at Townhouse Gallery, 18 April-12 May.
