SEARCH PART ONE

Cairo – with its dry, fruity smells and faded colours, its large-eyed people and skinny animals. Everything here calls me. I reach for my camera or my old iphone every few steps. Its crumbling walls, unfinished buildings, peeling paint, illegible posters. Everything begs to be photographed.

Chaotic and exaggerated proportions, hidden ancient glory, stunning architecture and glorious mosques; crammed neighbourhoods bursting with life, layered with garbage and dirt, embellished by unexpected splashes of bright colours, suffused with the smell of bread and fruits and grilled meat and turkish coffee; sprawling bazars filled to the brim with plastic knick-knack and beautiful hand-woven tapestries, food carts deep-frying the local version of falafel next to souvenirs stands overflowing with made-in-china pyramids and lucky beetles; kids speeding on motorbikes in narrow and busy alleys and pathways, zigzagging between animals and people, balancing stuff on their heads – Cairo is all of this at once and so much more.

When my feet hurt from too much walking, i type my destination in an app and one of those kids picks me up and drives me home for a ridiculously small amount of money. Sitting on the backseat of these agile little bikes, the wind in my eyes and hair, i feel refreshed and exhilarated, cleaned of all the dust that settled on me throughout my life. And i pray for it to not never catch up with me again. Sometimes the kid driving me tries to chat despite the speed and all the honking around us. A few times i praise their vehicle, and they smile and speed up, flattered and impressed, and we ride like a mad comet on highways and bridges, in tunnels sparkling with lights in the night. Please please please never catch up with me again!

Cities may enchant with their beauty and with their people. But here something new is happening: this indomitable city, beautiful and ugly in equal parts, where people are warm yet aloof, is charming me with the unpalatable mixture of her clashing opposites.

Photographing Cairo is telling me a lot about myself. People, animals, things, glimpses of life, shadows and contrasts. What is it that catches my eye? Why do i find something beautiful? And am i innocently capturing beauty, or am i just another white tourist romanticising poverty?