“I am a camera”
Christopher Isherwood
As well as experimenting with short stories and poetry, I have spent two decades wandering through antique lands in search of the photographic. Over the years I’ve taken several thousand pictures of Araby. It was in Cairo that I first stumbled across the work of the earliest photographers on the Nile, men like Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, Antonio Beato, Frederic Boissonnas and Hermann Burchardt, and they have inspired me to experiment with my own black and white photography.
I find it challenging to photograph people, but tombs, temples and pyramids lend themselves to daguerreotype, particularly in the bright sunlight, where light and shadow interplay in curious patterns. Encouraged by my efforts, I have continued to take pictures along the banks of the Nile from Cairo to Abu Simbel, and later I travelled farther afield into Jordan, Syria, Persia and Yemen in search of the exotic.
My images include cartouches from Egypt and ancient graffito from tombs and temples along the Nile, and it was in Jordan’s Wadi Rum that I had my most fascinating glimpses of epigraphy. Since then I have expanded my photographic inventory to include Arabic, Kufic, Thamudic, Nabataean and Sabaean (south Arabic) scripts. Of particular interest to me is the extraordinary rich collection of Nabataean, Neo-Semitic, Greek and Hebrew inscriptions in Wadi Mukattab in the Sinai Desert which I found with the help of the Bedouin. Some I have translated.
Critics tell us that there is no such thing as the innocent eye. As a geographer, my pictures have a tendency to evoke realism in a rather startling way: sometimes I think of the camera as an instrument that has to be cocked and fired rather like a Beretta. Yet many of my pictures also evoke scenes of timeless beauty. In some cases it is the framing of the picture that catches the viewer’s attention; in others it is the elegance of artifacts that merit scrutiny, such as a broken granite bust of a pharaoh lying half buried in sand, the lone and level sands stretching far away…
Being an independent traveller I am not rushed by the need to conform to a tight schedule, and sometimes I wait for hours for the sun to change its angle so I can capture the scene at the most opportune moment. Curiously, black and white pictures don’t lend themselves well to digital technology, so I use ASA 400 Ilford film. My camera is a venerable Pentax K1000 and I carry three lenses: 28mm; 50mm; and a 80mm to 200mm zoom. I rarely use filters, and tripods are too bulky to carry.
In 2017 an exhibition of my photographs was shown at the University of Victoria in Canada entitled: ‘The Gift of the Nile’. In the Spring of 2018 I had another display at the Union Club of British Columbia. This is the first time my pictures have appeared on the internet. What you see is a small cross-section of my black and white pictures from across the Middle East…ENJOY!
