Of Field Pharaohs and Fellahin
Foreword
Egypt is a great place for taking photos; the landscapes are full of drama, the sunshine ensures that bad light rarely stops play and at the right times of day sunlight and shadow fall so perfectly on great monuments that you could almost believe the ancients were still in charge. They certainly knew what they were doing.
Images of Egypt are everywhere and it’s easy to form a strong visual idea of the country without ever having been there. It’s made of sand and stone isn’t it? You go around on camels and it’s definitely always sunny... Mike’s book tells a subtly different story. Many of us, myself included, have taken hundreds of photographs which seem to confirm such expectations but of course our cameras only capture the things we want to see. Mike sees Egypt in a way that no other photographer I know does, and his photographs reveal aspects of the country most of us would barely even notice. As a result, his book provides a better flavour of the country – ancient and modern – than any other I have come across.
We ‘experts’ like to think we know Egypt particularly well. Egyptology is a science based on evidence which we try our best to evaluate impartially. We’ve studied its history, read hieroglyphic texts, and dug relics of the country’s ancient heritage out of the ground. But Egyptologists are often guilty of looking at one version of Egypt only; a romanticised Egypt in abstract. What Egyptology does not teach very well is an appreciation of the place of ancient monuments in the continuing history of the country. Understanding what is there now, as well as what Egypt is like today is fundamentally important to an understanding of what has gone before. To visit Egypt now is to watch how the latest chapter in its long and ongoing history is written.
Anyone who has ever spent any time in Egypt takes away with them not only memories of pyramids, hypostyle halls, and Ramesses the Great smiting his enemies, but of the throng of the souq, and the quiet of a deserted wadi, the smell of shisha, the proposed exchange of a companion for a few thousand camels, the arguments with taxi drivers and the feeling that the perfectly circular sun disk setting over the Nile can’t quite be real. Can it ?
Nothing of the atmosphere of this kind survives from ancient Egypt but I like to think, in the absence of anything to suggest otherwise, that certain elements of everyday life, the scents, odours, noises, colours, personalities and behaviour that seem so ephemeral and transient, perhaps haven’t changed as much as we think, but have in fact survived relatively unaltered, along with the natural landscape, and the climate. And those monuments of course. They seem to have paid little attention to the changes going on around them, and they’ll still be there long after we’re gone and forgotten.
In this book Mike has made no distinction between ancient and modern; no attempt to separate them. I admire the openness of this approach, unburdened as it is by preconceptions of Egypt. And even if I’m wrong about there having been so much continuity there is no question that the mixing of past and present in Mike’s work makes for some very, very beautiful images.
Chris Naunton
Deputy Director - Egypt Exploration Society
Introduction
I do not believe pictures need copious amounts of ‘creative philosophical waffle’ to prop them up, and if they do then they have failed as images. A combination of my personality, values, and personal likes and dislikes will simply draw me to one subject or another. For some strange reason people often feel a need to speculate or to look for hidden and significant depths in my pictures. This is their own mission and not something I would want to encourage. On more than one occasion I have heard an individual ‘explaining’ the concept behind one of my pictures. It can be quite entertaining but it is always news to me.
The text I have added to the images is of course personal. It is how I feel about the subject matter and often includes, where I felt appropriate, some explanation about how the shot came into being or my choice of facts about the locations. I hope you will find it entertaining as well as informative. Most of all I would like you to feel, as you turn the pages, either nostalgia for a country you may already know and love, or a real need to visit Egypt for the first time. It is my hope that you will be both moved and amazed whether we walk together amongst the giants of history, or with the fellahin in a simple field of cabbages, toward the final moments of the day with the sun’s rays fading inexorably across the land.