Waiting at the Taps: Stereography and Water Infrastructure in Cairo
Among the many images of Egyptian laborers and street hawkers produced during the early twentieth century is a stereo print with a handwritten-inscription identifying the people in the image as “water sellers” or “water carriers” (Figure 1). The setting is a public water tap in the middle of an unpaved thoroughfare in Cairo. It is likely hot and near the middle of the day, as the sun casts very little shadow. A modern apartment building with a modest central projection provides the backdrop. Simple shutters over small windows are flung open to coax a breeze inside. A towel hangs out of one window, the swoop of a pulled-back curtain is just visible in another. Despite the label, the subject of the stereograph is uncertain. Only the first man in line has a goatskin sack, the typical accoutrement of a professional water carrier. In contrast, the rest of the people in line hold nothing except perhaps impatience. All of them are men, all of them stand and wait.
Figure 1. Filling their goat skins, water sellers of Cairo, Egypt (inscription on verso), stereo print, undated. Courtesy: Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.
A stereograph is a set of two almost identical photographs that when viewed through a stereoscope provides the illusion of three-dimensional space (Figure 2). Stereographs were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were often sold in sets comprising prosaic and everyday images as well as scenes of famous landscapes and ancient monuments. Manufacturers claimed that through this simple mechanical contraption, one could experience the “real” Cairo, for instance, without leaving the comfort of one’s living room. Producers aimed to convince the consumer that the stereoscope projected an unprecedented verisimilitude that served as a conduit of emotional as well as intellectual knowledge:
“Whatever ideas or emotions we gain in connection with the stereographs are such ideas and emotions as those places and they only could give…we shall get the emotions of the place…to just the degree that we are able to forget that we are looking at a stereograph and feel that we are in the presence of the place itself.”[1]
Figure 2. The stereograph as an educator - Underwood patent extension cabinet in a home library. Stereocard, 1900-1910, Underwood & Underwood. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Although the author does not use the word “space,” the combination of the words place and emotion gesture toward this concept. The stereograph viewed through the stereoscope provides a spatial illusion; a singular armchair experience, the author seems to imply, available only through this device.
We have been trained to be critical of such claims, and rightly so. Photography was a particularly useful vehicle for imperialist worldviews that could flatten people and culture into consumable objects, reducing them to the limited space and time of the camera’s shutter. And yet, I am intrigued by the possibility of what comes forward within the frame if we take the author’s word that the stereoscope cultivates a spatial experience. What spaces does the stereoscope reveal, and how does it do this? This article teases out an unintended spatial history of modern water infrastructure glimpsed within a series of stereograph contact prints of urban Egyptians waiting in line at public water taps.
These prints are all held in the Keystone Mast Collection at UC Riverside. Keystone Mast was a major producer of stereographs. In this collection, there are dozens of photographs depicting so-called water carriers. Of these about thirteen depict people standing at taps in various locations in Egypt, all produced between 1900 and 1935 (Figures 3 and 4; see Figure 1). In one example, two men wait in line for a turn at the tap (see Figure 3). The water carrier at the front holds the mouth of his goatskin sack to the tap. Spilled water darkens the front of the pump and the ground on which he and the other water carriers stand barefoot. The man second in line seems to be pulling his sack forward from his back, preparing for his turn. He also carries a walking stick. Both water carriers wear similar robes and white caps. Hands to spout, eyes to water, the water carriers ignore the photographer and the act of making the photograph. And yet, the camera angle and framing create the illusion that the viewer is next in line. We are provided with only a glimpse of the setting, which is likely a busy, modern street in the middle of Cairo. A tall, whitewashed building with metal window grilles and modest, shallow balconies stands in the background.
Figure 3. The goatskins hold from 2x4 weibas of water [weibas 8 gallon]. These men are employed in sprinkling of the streets and labor all day for six piastres. Cairo, Egypt (inscription on verso). Keystone photo print, 1931, Keystone View Company. Courtesy: Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.
Figure 4. Stereo print showing line of people waiting at tap outside of the funerary complex of Khayrbak. The note on the back misidentifies the building as the complex of Qaytbay. Courtesy: Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.
A handwritten note on the back of the stereograph, perhaps written by the photographer, reads in part: “These men are employed in sprinkling of the streets and labor all day for six piastres.” There are 100 piasters in an Egyptian pound. The note thus classifies these water carriers as day laborers employed by the city to water dirt streets in order to reduce dust. Why does the note mention this task at all, while ignoring what is depicted in the photograph? There is no mention of the tap, for instance, nor the attendant, nor the line of people waiting for water. A spatial history of water might ask why the space of the tap is elided in the caption. We cannot take the circumstances of the space of the tap for granted. What else might this photograph and its caption be hiding?
A few other visual sources suggest a potential answer. A municipal map at the sufficiently detailed scale of 1:1000 produced by the Survey of Egypt in 1913 and updated in the 1930s shows that taps were rare, and that a walk to and from the tap was a trek (Figures 5 and 6). Many people, not only professional water carriers, waited in line on hot, busy streets to pull water from them. In one stereograph the extent of such lines is quite visible (see Figure 4). Men, women, and children wait in this line next to the Mamluk funerary complex of Khayrbak in Darb al-Ahmar. Some hold pots, others goatskin sacks, and still others nothing at all, suggesting they will use their hands to get water. It seems that the photographer asked the people in line to look at the camera. They do so, but none of them move from their spot in line. The inhabitants of Cairo, the capitol of Egypt, a nation defined in the global popular imagination by the Nile, struggled to get water.
“These stereograph prints, by placing us in line at the tap, expose modern water distribution as fundamentally a labor of bodies, and a banal strain on patience.”
Figure 5. Annotated map indicating water company taps, mosques, and sabils. Showing a portion of the administrative district and neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar. Sheet 40-J, Maslahat al-Misahah, Cairo, 1:1000, 1915, portions updated 1920-1986. Courtesy: Rare Books and Special Collections Library, The American University in Cairo.
Figure 6. Detail of Figure 5. Annotated map with hypothetical trip from a home to a public water tap indicated. Courtesy: Rare Books and Special Collections Library, The American University in Cairo.
The constriction of water access displayed in these images was due to several intertwined processes, including British occupation and the commodification of the city’s water supply. The Cairo Water Company, founded in around 1865, commercialized water access. Company leadership unevenly extended pipes and taps, first to the new, upper-class districts on the west side of town, and haltingly to the older, significantly denser districts in the old city, of which Darb al-Ahmar is a part. They grudgingly supplied water gratis to the poor, a contractual requirement that newspaper articles from the time indicate was unreliable at best.[2] People responded in different ways to being forced to use taps few and far between. They walked and waited, but they also complained to the government and to newspapers; they broke taps and spread rumors that the tap water was contaminated.[3] Clearly, the capitalist-driven constriction of water was a major logistical and cultural shift that the people of Cairo resented. The people standing in line at the tap are evidence of this. Their queuing is not a neutral act.
These stereograph prints, by placing us in line at the tap, expose modern water distribution as fundamentally a labor of bodies, and a banal strain on patience. Indeed, as the first image thoroughly represents, the public tap required the user suffer tedium as well as physical effort (see Figure 1). There are at least seven people in line waiting to draw water. One man stands back surveying the line in front of him with hands on hips, a familiar gesture of impatience. The human dimension of water infrastructure is visible in pattern, as well as in the subtle yet unmistakable individual gestures that accompany indefinite queuing. Spaces between people are irregular and personal space is ill defined. Some fiddle with clothing, others rub eyes, and still others prepare for their turn. In sum, the inescapable space of the tap demands a critical reworking of the history of modern water infrastructure.
A spatial history of water, propelled through the lens of the stereoscope, is an uneven and fraught one. Taps and underground pipes inhibited, constricted, and constrained water access for all but a select, elite few. Colonial officials defined such water infrastructure as an unqualified good, a positivist enterprise that benefited rich and poor equally by reducing illness and providing convenience.[4] But in the space of the street, in line at the tap, such a proposition simply did not hold water. Indeed, water constriction, waiting, and resistance remain a fundamental part of living with water scarcity in contemporary Egypt, an unfortunate and urgent reminder of the endurance and resilience of uneven systems.
Citation
Alex Schultz, “Waiting at the Taps: Stereography and Water Infrastructure in Cairo,” PLATFORM, 31 October, 2022.
Notes
[1] Albert Osborne, The Stereograph and the Stereoscope (New York: Underwood & Underwood, 1909), 98.
[2] For example: Al-Ahram (August 24, 1907): 1-2.
[3] Such instances (complaints, breaking taps, rumors) were reported frequently in daily newspapers from 1882-1935. Anecdotally I can say such notices proliferated in the 1920s and 30s especially. Two examples: Al-Mu‘ayyad (September 2, 1902): 3; Al-Ahram (August 21, 1925): 5.
[4] Jean-Baptiste Piot, “La Question de L’eau d’alimentation dans les Villes du Caire et de’Alexandrie,” Bulletin de l’Institut Egyptien (June 1894): 267–75.
