Cairo-based visual and graphic designer Ahmed Elnafad documents graffiti, street markings, layered posters and erased messages across Egypt in a 358-page hand-bound photobook, treating city walls as unstable public archives constantly written on, erased and rewritten.
Ahmed Elnafad was sixteen when he painted a wall with friends and got chased away by authorities shortly after. That experience planted something. He became increasingly drawn to graffiti not as image but as a form of presence, tension and public expression embedded into the city itself. Seven years later, 30°N is the result.
The project documents graffiti and street markings across Egypt through harsh black-and-white bitmap imagery, spanning a visual archive captured from 2021 to the present. The geography moves between the dense urban architecture of Greater Cairo and the coastal landscape of South Sinai, building a structural contrast that mirrors the thematic one: surfaces that are official and surfaces that resist, walls that have been painted over and walls that still carry what someone needed to say.
“A wall in Egypt is never truly blank; it’s a battleground of memory,” Elnafad says. “By capturing these marks, I wanted to freeze that brief moment of tension before the paint is scraped away or covered over.”
The book does not romanticise. The bitmap treatment is deliberate — influenced by underground print culture, punk zines and photocopied archives, it strips the images back to rawness, emphasising decay and impermanence over beauty. The walls are treated as unstable public records, which is what they are: contested archives that authorities and communities are constantly writing over each other.
The object itself is built to the same standard of intention. 358 pages on 130gsm premium uncoated cotton rag paper, hand-bound in exposed Coptic stitch with high-tensile crimson red thread, covered in raw unbleached heavyweight canvas, printed in high-density monochrome black and duotone at 175 by 240mm. The thread is the only colour. It is hard to miss.
Ahmed Elnafad is a Cairo-based visual and graphic designer working across editorial design, multimedia and web-based visual systems, with a focus on culture, archiving and urban narratives.
Instagram: @ahmedinvisuals
30°N, 2021 to present. 358 pages, 175 × 240mm. Hand-bound Coptic stitch, crimson red thread. Heavyweight hard canvas cover. 130gsm uncoated cotton rag paper. High-density monochrome black and duotone.
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