At the port folio reviews of the 2025 Visa Pour l’Image, Islam Safwat has been selected as a Coup de Coeur based on his personal project When Time Doesn’t Heal.
As a Coup de Coeur selectee, Islam Safwat must submit his project for the French organisation ANI – Association Nationale des Iconographes. A jury will choose three projects among the Coup de Coeur selectees. The three winners will be exhibited in Paris. Later, an overall winner of the ANI-Pix Trakk Award will be chosen. The winner will get 6,000 Euro and be presented at the 2026 Visa Pour l’Image.
When Time Doesn’t Heal
How evidence of me becomes evidence of us
by Islam Safwat
An open wound grows whenever I recall this memory, and I wish I could erase it. Every time it comes to me as a horrible flashback that pushes me into a very bad mood. Moments of fear and inability during the innocent childhood could break something inside that time doesn’t heal. Years passed and I grew older, I recalled the incident and deciphered it based on the findings I made. Touches that broke my personal barrier. The more I knew, the more unpleasant my interpretation became. Later, I learned that it was called “child sexual abuse,” I was a victim, but I covered up the abuse in my mind.
When Time Doesn’t Heal is a personal and collaborative project that consists of 16 images. The images and texts tell six individual stories about sexual abuse in Egypt.
Cairo, Egypt, April 29, 2018. Photo: Islam Safwat
Photo: Islam Safwat
Islam Safwat made When Time Doesn’t Heal during the DEDI – DMJX educational programme run in 2021 and 2022 in Cairo. The educational programme was initiated and sponsored by DEDI – The Danish Egyptian Dialogue Initiative and consisted of four workshops for 12 selected Egyptian photographers.
The first three workshops focussed on visual story tellling, portraiture and writing for photojournalists. After these workshops, the participants worked on their final stories. At the final workshop, the final stories were edited, the texts were written and finally the programme concluded in an exhibition at Kodak Passageway in downtown Cairo.