The jury of the IV edition of the Star Photobook Dummy Award has chosen as winner the photobook dummy Our Hidden Room, by the British-Egyptian Mohamed Hassan, which now will become a photobook with international distribution.
Our Hidden Room tells the fragmented story of the complex but loving relationship between the author and his father, also a photographer. During the author’s youth in Egypt, his father often behaved erratically and reclusively, becoming increasingly obsessed with a small, dark hidden room in the family home. His father suffered from bipolar disorder and, at a time when mental health issues were not widely understood, this ultimately led to his suicide.
This winning dummy was nominated for the Award by the British curator and artistic director Louise Fedotov-Clements, director of Photoworks and member of the team of international nominators of the Star Award 2024. The Jury of this edition has selected this project as the winner, after selecting it as one of the 11 finalists for the Award, among more than 150 dummies received.
‘Our Hidden Room’, the winning photobook dummy tells the story of the relationship between the author and his father
The jury’s decision is based on the following verdict:
Hassan’s book project is an enigmatic but engaging personal exploration of mental disorders, family relationships and trauma. The starting point is the recollection of his father’s problematic bipolar life in his native Egypt, and the complexity of connecting to images and places through a diasporic lens, touching on the ideas of memory, belonging, pain and guilt. Turning his gaze on his own country and family from the point of view of his life abroad connects him to a broader understanding of self that mixes nostalgia and displacement: the distance allows a deeper analysis but also offers a renewed opportunity for the retracing of his identity.
Working with his own images as well as family archive pictures, Hassan paints a labyrinth of emotions that brings us into a wide spectrum of issues that are often hidden or left unspoken.
Mohamed Hassan was born in 1984 in Alexandria, Egypt. He first moved to Wales in 2007. He studied photography at Carmarthen School of Art (2016), prior to completing a master’s in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales (2023). In recent years, Hassan’s work has been included in several prestigious group exhibitions, including: ‘Facing Britain: British documentary photography since the 1960s’ curated by Ralph Goertz (multiple venues across Europe, 2021-2023),‘Many Voices, One Nation’, curated by Ffotogallery and the Senedd (multiple venues across Wales, 2019-2020), and The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize (National Portrait Gallery, 2018). His work has also recently been acquired by collections including the National Museum of Wales and the Government Art Collection..
The Photographic Social Vision Foundation thanks the international nominators for the high quality of all the proposals sent, and we also thank the jury for their hard work selecting and evaluating all the dummies.
Congratulations to all the authors of the dummies received, especially the eleven who made it into the shortlist and, of course, congratulations to the final winner. We are looking forward, with great enthusiasm, to start the process of turning the dummy Our Hidden Room into a photobook, along with its author Mohammed Hassan and the publishers: Ediciones Posibles, Phree and Editorial RM.
