Gelatin Silver Prints. Collection I

These photographs were born in the quiet solitude of the darkroom. While pursuing my PhD in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, I converted a corner of my apartment into a makeshift darkroom, later continuing the process in university facilities—including the darkroom at UAE University. Each print was developed and processed by hand using traditional silver-gelatin techniques, transforming negatives into carefully crafted images through a slow and deliberate process that digital photography has largely erased.

The photographs themselves were taken primarily in 1994 using a 35mm Canon AE-1 and Canon A-1, along with a medium-format Yashica camera, all loaded with Ilford film. They capture street life, architecture, and everyday urban scenes from a Cairo that was already beginning to fade—moments of ordinary life, fragments of buildings and streets, and glimpses of a city in transition. Some prints have been archivally processed and mounted on museum boards to ensure their longevity as physical objects.

These images are not reproductions of a digital archive but original darkroom prints—each one a singular artifact. For that reason, every photograph available in the store is offered as a unique print that will not be reproduced again. Together, they form a visual record of Cairo at a particular moment in time, seen through the eyes of an architect and urban observer who understood even then that the city’s everyday scenes were quietly disappearing.