Cairo’s Tahrir Square is the focus of a new book of photography, Messages from Tahrir. It documents the signs carried by protestors in all their witty and reactionary glory, edited by the fabulously well-spoken Cairene Karima Khalil.

I heard her talk about her book yesterday at Leighton House as part of the Nour Festival of Arts. Karima’s a medical doctor as well as an amateur photographer and she first ventured into the square on the 29^th of January. Normally Egyptian protests last a few hours before all ten protestors are beaten and dragged off by the state police, she said. So she was surprised to see a quarter of a million Egyptians in the square, many with striking signs. Karima started photographing them shortly afterwards. The book is a compilation of her photographs as well as the work of foreign and Egyptian photographers, both professional and amateur.

Egyptians have a great sense of humour – they often claim that’s the only way they survived 30 years of Mubarak’s rule. Karima showed a photo of a man with a sign reading “Leave! I want to go home and see my wife, I’ve only been married twenty days.” She said many variants of that phrase popped up, with phrases like “Leave! My arm hurts,” or “Leave! I need a shave.” Students planning to sit crucial tests wrote “Hurry up! We have exams.” Memes like this worked like Twitter hashtags, with each protestor putting their own spin on the meme.

The protestors used images as well as words. Some of the funniest pictures showed graphically designed messages. One had a replica of the departure stamp all travellers receive when they leave Cairo’s airport, ‘stamped’ over Mubarak’s name. Another showed a barcode with ‘Mubarak’ written above, like on printed food packaging – complete with an expiry date. Another man carried a large red pot with the words “I’ve been waiting for you to leave for 30 years” written on it. In Egyptian culture, if you want a guest to never come back you break a little clay pot over the threshold once they’ve gone. It seems you need a big pot to make sure a president stays away.

Karima also explained how the protestors also used signs to react to the government’s actions – particularly important during the phone and internet blackout. At first Mubarak dismissed the protestors with a speech reminding them that he was the father of the nation. She then showed us a man holding a sign “How can you say you’re our father? Aren’t you the one who killed our brother?” That wryly humorous approach to tragedy is very Egyptian. The government also claimed that Iran was sponsoring the protestors, or that European powers were bribing them with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Cue mocking signs like “Where’s my Kentucky?” and “I’m an Iranian agent. But I still want you out.” When Mubarak quailed and offered to negotiate with the protestors there was an explosion of placards saying “No talking. Get out.” In this way, the square worked like a social media ecosystem with participants ‘talking back’ to power.

In their desire to communicate the protestors wrote on anything they could find. Karima displayed a man with a sign sticking up from his glasses and another with “Get out” written on his forehead and “Tyrant” written on his palm,  allowing him to display whichever one he chose. Injured protestors often wrote messages on their bandages and dressings, turning their wounds into designs. Bandages are changed every day so they’d write a new statement each morning. The state police shot rubber bullets at protestors’ heads so many of them lost eyes. Karima showed us a man with “My eye was not lost in vain” written on the bandages covering the socket. Another became a mini celebrity after he had a fancy silver eyepatch made with the date he lost his eye. Tragically, he was just shot in the other eye by the military police, ending his career as a dentist.

The last few days have seen another explosion of violence in Tahrir. The military government is casting the protestors as fringe troublemakers, rather than a genuinely concerned cross-section of Egyptian society. Messages from Tahrir depicts Egyptians from all walks of life participating in the protest. Karima told us she hoped to help Egyptians realize that the protestors were just like them. There are photos of religious Muslims and Christians, of men and women, of young and old, many holding signs saying “We are all Egyptians” with a crescent and a cross. One protestor from a poor, rural area holds a sign saying “Leave before the Upper Egyptians get here” written in a country dialect.

I could keep going. There’s wonderful variety of images in Messages from Tahrir and I’d strongly encourage you to buy it here. All profits go to support victims of torture in the uprisings. And if you want your own politically relevant piece of design, brief the Exchange.