Went Looking Zamalek · Downtown · Maadi, the only frames nobody assigned
Three walks, three neighbourhoods: Zamalek's colonial staircases and rust; Downtown's belle-époque balconies, where we arrived in the middle of a contemporary dance piece being performed on the paving; and Maadi, leafy, suburban, full of hard yellow walls. No assignment attached, nobody's graduation, nobody's concert, no client.
It shows. The recurring find is simple and completely Cairo: a saturated flat wall in hard sun, and something alive placed against it. A woman in pink glasses who looks straight back. A dog under a sodium lamp who does the same. Everything else got photographed because it was happening. This got photographed because someone went looking.
Hard Sun
Cairo at two in the afternoon gives you one gift: a wall the colour of a traffic sign, and shade with an edge like a blade.
The City's Bones
Colonial, belle-époque, brutalist, rusted through, the city keeps every draft of itself stacked on top of the last one.
Interruptions, After Dark
We turned a corner and there were people throwing themselves at the paving with a shopping trolley; nobody had told us. Later: sodium and neon, and the two best faces of the three walks, one of them a dog.
