His name is Mahmoud Abu Zeid, but his friends call him Shawkan, a nod to his father, Abed Shakur. When the 2011 protests in Egypt toppled Mubarak, Shawkan was a spectator. “I was sceptical,” he told RSF. “So I decided to document it to understand it better.” A freelance photojournalist, he slipped into the protests, dressed in black and with his camera in hand.

A journalism graduate from Cairo University, he fell in love with the profession thanks to a course taught by photographer Thomas Hartwell. In 2008, Shawkan started working for the daily newspaper Al Akhbar, then for Al Ahram. When the revolution broke out in 2011, he had just joined the photojournalist platform Demotex, which has since been bought by Getty Images.

On 14 August 2013, Shawkan was covering a sit-in by supporters of Mohamed Morsi in Rabaa Square in Cairo. “Usually, I stand between the police and the protesters,” Shawkan recalls. “But that day, I stayed close to the police, thinking it was safer.” During the violent dispersal of the demonstration, security forces killed several hundred protesters. Shawkan was arrested while doing his job. “Plainclothes police officers searched my camera and my papers,” he said. “When the prosecutor renewed my detention for another 15 days the first time, I was devastated.” He spent more than five years in prison without trial. In September 2018, he was finally convicted in a mass trial involving more than 700 detainees. Sisi's justice system released the photojournalist after he served his sentence, but then sentenced him to five more years of police surveillance, obliging him to spend twelve hours every night at a police station. "Prison was hell, but it was the surveillance that broke me. Was I free? Could I work?“ The five years of constant surveillance destroyed Shawkan. ”I became anxious and depressed. I was afraid.“

While in prison, he became an international symbol of the free press – his saving grace. ”That was my strength," he replies, beaming. He remembers a letter his brother showed him, sent by RSF to the Egyptian government asking for his release. “You supported me from the beginning. It made all the difference.” Now, trying to rebuild his life, Shawkan still wonders why he was so harshly repressed. “I never took sides,” he says. "I just held up a camera. That's all.“ But that's how dictatorships work, he believes. They pick on ordinary people. ”They wanted to make an example of me,“ he says. ”By arresting me, they decided to make me an icon."

Article written by Jonathan Dagher, head of the Middle East desk at RSF. Published in RSF album "100 Photos for press freemdom"