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As a collector of 19th- and 20th-century photography, I have frequently encountered a problem with vintage photographs curling up when the climate is dry or due to heating during winter. Photographic prints are very sensitive to dry air. For years, I didn’t know how to solve this problem, so I stored the prints in tubes to protect them. Recently, I learned of an easy way to unfurl photos. Here is a video of my homemade solution to this common issue.

In the autumn of 1994, I traveled with fellow photographer and friend Patrick Godeau to the oasis of Siwa in Egypt’s Western Desert to witness and photograph the mulid or religious festival that takes place there every year under the first full moon in October. Siwa lies between the Qattara depression and the Great Sand Sea near Egypt’s border with Libya and is about 10 hours from Cairo by car. The people of Siwa are culturally and ethnically closer to the Berbers of North Africa than they are to the Egyptian who live along the Nile Valley. Even though they understand and speak Arabic, Siwans prefer to communicate amongst themselves in a Berber dialect. Up until the mid 1990s Siwa remained largely off the tourism grid partly due to government restrictions on foreigners traveling to remote areas of the country. Patrick, who had visited in 1983 using a special travel permit, immediately noticed the number of Egyptians from the Nile Valley who had settled in the oasis. To me, however, [Read more...]

The Jewish Festival of Light reminds me of one of the last significant gathering of Jews in Egypt, which took place nearly two decades ago during a Hanukkah celebration at Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. Jewish guests from different parts of the world, along with foreign residents of Egypt from the Jewish faith, joined the handful of Egyptian Jews for the occasion.  For the locals, the festivities were a throwback to happier times when the Egyptian Jewish community was thriving and numbered in the tens of thousands. Until the creation of Israel in 1948, Egypt’s Jewish community was roughly 75,000.  That number had already dropped from a high of 100,000 at the beginning century due to nationalist fervor against British occupation, which created some apprehension among the Jewish and European residents of Egypt. From the 1920s onwards there was a slow but constant stream of Egyptian Jews leaving the country. The second blow to Egypt’s Jewish community happened right after [Read more...]

The United Arab Emirates is contributing 50.4 million dollars to UNESCO for the rebuilding of al Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq. The Islamic State (ISIS) destroyed the mosque intentionally in 2017 as Iraqi troops were in the final stages of liberating the country’s third largest city. Ironically, it was from the pulpit of this same mosque that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had announced in 2015 the formation of a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The 800-year old mosque, with its iconic leaning minaret, was one of Mosul’s most recognizable landmarks affectionately called al Haba or “the Hunchback.” Pictures of the minaret were found on postcards and are featured on Iraq’s 10,000-dinar bank note. The mosque is named after Nur al Din Mahmoud al Zangi, a leader who was instrumental in uniting Moslems in what is now Syria and Iraq to join forces in defeating the Crusaders in the 12th century. Nur al Din used the spoils he reaped during wartime to build madrassas or religious [Read more...]

Donkeys and mules have had a long and distinguished career in modern military warfare. During the two world wars, they played a key role in transporting supplies over rugged mountains and jungle terrain inaccessible to motorized vehicles. The practice was extended to the colonial and Cold War eras where the animals were used by British troops stationed in Egypt and Palestine and American soldiers during their short-lived invasion of Lebanon in 1958. During the World War I Battle of Gallipoli, a medic from New Zealand named James Gardiner Jackson took a photograph of a fellow countryman transporting a wounded soldier to a field hospital on donkey back. The photograph became immortalized when artist Horace Moore-Jones, another New Zealander who also fought in Gallipoli, drew a number of paintings based on that image. It turned out that the stretcher-bearer, Dick Henderson, had used his donkey to save many other wounded soldiers. Today the paintings hang in war memorials and museums in [Read more...]