Photography

A stunning photographic compilation of Egypt’s abandoned palaces and grand buildings

Between 1860 and 1940, Cairo and other large cities in Egypt witnessed a major construction boom that gave birth to extraordinary palaces and lavish buildings. These incorporated a mix of architectural styles, such as Beaux-Arts and Art Deco, with local design influences and materials. Today, many lie empty and neglected, rapidly succumbing to time, a real-estate frenzy, and an ongoing population crisis.

In 2006 Russian-born photographer Xenia Nikolskaya began the process of documenting these structures. She gained exceptional access to them, taking photographs at some thirty locations, including Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Minya, Esna, and Port Said. These photographs were documented in the first edition of Dust: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture, which soon after its release in 2012 became a rare collector’s item.

This revised and expanded edition includes photographs from the first edition together with extra unseen images and new photographs taken by Nikolskaya between 2013 and 2021. It also includes previously unpublished essays by Heba Farid, co-owner of the Cairo-based photo gallery Tintera, and architect and urban planner Omar Nagati, co-founder of CLUSTER, an urban design and research platform also in Cairo.

Dust: Egypt's Forgotten Architecture leads us seductively into some of the most breathtaking architectural spaces of Egypt's recent past, filled with a sense of both the immense weight and the impermanence of history.

As the 25 January Revolution got under way and grew from strength to strength, six young Egyptian photographers found themselves following and documenting the events in different parts of Cairo, and converging—as the demonstrations converged—on what became the focal point of the revolution, Tahrir Square. Between them they photographed many of the unprecedented and startling events around the city and in the square, from the early battles of the protesters against heavily armed security forces, through the attacks by paid thugs on camel and horseback, and the peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square, to the victory celebrations and the inspiring clean-up afterward. Together in this stunning visual record they present the days of the revolution in sequence, from tear gas to tears of joy, picturing a story of determination and courage that inspired the world.

Using vintage photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, many of them from private family albums, this book brings to life the world of that vanished Alexandria, a vibrant, stylish, and cosmopolitan city, the largest port in the Mediterranean, that was the prosperous gateway between Egypt and the world. Seen here in the setting of their homes and gardens, and on the city’s streets and beaches, the faces of those forgotten Alexandrians come to life: the Greeks, Italians, Jews, and all those others from around the Mediterranean whose energy and expertise helped modernize and develop Egypt, and who planted their family roots in the city. This was the luxuriant and evocative city celebrated by Constantine Cavafy, E.M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell, and they too are included in these pages along with photographs of scenes and people that were familiar to them. Vintage Alexandria traces the development and growth of the city, follows its story through the dramatic events of two world wars, and above all provides a background to the city’s place in twentieth-century cultural history, through the eyes of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan citizens themselves.

Those citizens and others who passed through the city and appear in these pages included Antony Benaki (the Greek cotton trader whose collection formed the basis of the famous Benaki Museum in Athens), Robert Koch (who isolated the cholera virus and developed a vaccine in an Alexandria laboratory), the Greek children’s writer Penelope Delta, Claude Vincendon (the third wife of Lawrence Durrell), King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, Eve Cohen (the second wife of Lawrence Durrell, and the model for “Justine”), Safinaz Zulfikar (later married to King Farouk as Queen Farida), Rudolph Hess (Hitler’s deputy, who attended school in Alexandria), Jean de Menasce (the “best translator” of T.S. Eliot), Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine, the Egyptian and international film star Omar Sharif, King Hussein of Jordan, Rhona Haszard (the post-impressionist painter), Ahmed Hassanein Pasha (the Egyptian explorer and diplomat), and Noel Coward (the English writer and wit, who sang at the Fleet Club in Alexandria and was mobbed by sailors).

In the twelfth century, Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi affirmed that the Egyptian baths were “the most beautiful in the East, the most practical, and the best located.” Nine centuries later, forgotten by the country’s restoration campaign, Cairo’s few remaining steam baths are drowning in general indifference. Places of relaxation and ritual, known for their therapeutic virtues, the last public baths are attempting to resist the evolution of tradition and real estate pressure. Curiously, the dilapidated state of the buildings, with their outstanding architecture, is full of charm: the decor is bright, flashy, and oriental, and the mixture of unusual objects creates a unique atmosphere. This book, with its exceptional color photographs and personal narrative, invites you into the intimacy of these bathhouses from another age before their definitive disappearance.

In this beautiful art book, award-winning American photographer Ann Parker records and celebrates life as it passes along a road through a typical village in the Egyptian Nile Delta in the early twenty-first century. But her photographs are not mere documents of a specific time and place; they transcend both as she captures timeless moments in an eternal world and presents us with a potentially infinite and hauntingly memorable pageant of living tableaux, silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. Like spectators seated in a theater, we watch the comings and goings of the village’s people, animals, and vehicles on the road in front of us.
Introducing the photographs are extracts from the autobiographical reflections of the poet Muhammad Afifi Matar, who was born and grew up in a small Delta village very like the one pictured by Ann Parker. His recollections of a rural Egyptian childhood and adolescence are sometimes warming, sometimes chilling, but always insightful and thought-provoking.

When Egyptians began demonstrating against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak on 25 January 2011, few could anticipate that the demonstrations would grow into a revolution to astonish the world. Millions of Egyptians were soon joining in every day in cities across the country, but Tahrir Square became the beating heart of the revolution, its center, its life force, and its spirit, a spirit that was peaceful, inclusive, creative, and determined. Swedish photographer Mia Gröndahl returned day after day to the square, to record the incredible tent city within a city that would not budge until the president did, and to capture the great humanity of the revolution that impressed Cairo, Egypt, and the world. This book presents a selection of Mia’s moving photographs from those historic days, along with the testimony in words of some of the people who were there.

In Re:viewing Egypt, Xavier Roy’s breathtaking photographs of Egypt offer us a haunting vision of a country and its people. They are also a lesson in the art of photography itself, inviting us to experience images as metaphor, to extend our notions of reality. Roy draws us into Egypt’s mystique, its scintillating waters, bucolic vistas, ruins, and places of worship. We observe the correspondences of shape and texture, perspective and repetition, light and shadow, and the vitality in the mundane and commonplace. A photograph of an acacia tree is juxtaposed with one of birds in flight, their formation and movement echoing the outline and feather-like aspect of the tree. Each photograph is at once an offer of tranquility and a call to interpret.
Gamal al-Ghitani’s profoundly contemplative introduction is both inspiring and inspired by Roy’s gallery of one hundred images, compelling us to observe Egypt’s riches not as passive onlookers, but as engaged, reflective beings.

John Feeney arrived in Egypt in 1963 to make a documentary film, intending to stay for one year and staying forty. Photographing Egypt brings together some of his now rare color photographs of Egypt, taken over the past forty years and displayed in a major retrospective exhibition of his work in March 2005 at the American University in Cairo’s Sony Gallery. The photographs depict the epic grandeur of Egypt, and include historic pictures of Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s funeral cortege leaving Qasr al-Nil Bridge and of the last Nile flood to come to Egypt, as well as aspects of the country rarely dealt with previously—the unique domes of Cairo, the extraordinary multicolored pavilions of the Tentmakers’ Street, the gathering of jasmine blossoms in the Nile Delta, the search for the elusive desert truffle, the shadow puppet plays of Cairo’s street theater, and the hammams of the medieval city. The photographs are accompanied by extracts from the photographer’s narration to his Nile film Fountains of the Sun, and from his essays that have appeared over the years in Aramco World Magazine.

One of the many striking things about Egypt’s 25 January Revolution as manifested in Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the imagination and creativity of the posters, placards, and signs that the protesters wore, waved, or hung from buildings, fences, and lampposts day by day throughout the demonstrations. These emotive messages displayed a range of visual inventiveness and linguistic dexterity (in Arabic, English, and several other languages) that expressed very powerful feelings yet often entertained at the same time. Egyptian amateur photographer Karima Khalil here gathers images taken by herself and others of these messages, showing their great variety, from the simple and repeated Irhal (“Leave”), written in a hundred different ways, to poems, rhyming slogans, puns, jokes, and tributes to the martyrs killed by security forces in the protests. These messages, captured by more than thirty photographers, form a compelling visual record of a people’s long suppressed hopes and desires.

Graffiti began in Gaza in 1987, during the first Intifada, when there was no Palestinian television or radio in the Gaza Strip, and no newspapers: the messages that spread along the walls became an important means of communication. Over the years, all political groups have had their own graffiti artists. Scrawl is not tolerated—it has to look good. Hamas even offers evening classes in graffiti. Documenting the writings on the walls of Gaza over a period of seven years, celebrated Swedish photojournalist Mia Gröndahl lays before us the many roles that they perform, the colorful and surprising range of their artistic expression, and their reflection of the changing political situation. And apart from political slogans, the walls bear witness too to joy and sadness: the wedding celebrations, the many victims of the conflict, and the ever present hope of peace and freedom. For us on the outside, Mia Gröndahl’s photographs offer an exciting and unexpected view of life in Gaza.

The diaries of Muhammad ‘Ali Effendi Sa‘udi, a civil servant and accomplished photographer, offer a rare glimpse of the Hajj through Egyptian eyes at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire was on the wane and the advance of the Hijaz railway threatened to upset vested interests in the old pattern of pilgrimage.
Sa‘udi twice accompanied the Amir al-Hajj, Ibrahim Rif‘at Pasha, attached to the official Egyptian caravan. His story of these journeys combines the thoughts of a devout Muslim with fine detail on the hardships and health hazards facing pilgrims, the high-level intrigues, and the ever-present dangers of taking photographs.
The authors have compressed the diaries into a highly readable narrative with selected quotations, lavishly illustrated with Sa‘udi’s remarkable photographs.