The Cairo Archive
The 35mm Collection:
The Gelatin Silver Print Collection:
The Cairo Archive brings together a body of photographs taken in 1994 that document the city’s architectural landscapes, streets, and everyday spaces at a moment when many of them were already beginning to disappear. Created through extended walks and quiet observation, the images record fragments of urban life—mosques and minarets rising above dense neighborhoods, weathered doorways and narrow streets shaped by centuries of habitation, and the human presence that animates these spaces. Seen today, they form a visual record of a city in transition, capturing places whose atmosphere, scale, and rhythms have since been altered by rapid change.
The archive is organized into several thematic sections that reflect both the diversity of Cairo’s urban fabric and the different photographic approaches used to document it. The Medium Format series presents a broader exploration of the city through carefully composed images that capture markets, architecture, and everyday encounters. Complementing this are several 35mm sequences that focus on specific elements of Cairo’s historic environment: Mosques and Minarets, highlighting the city’s remarkable religious architecture; Streets and Doorways, which examine the intimate details of its residential fabric; and more focused urban studies such as the Sultan Hassan / Rifa‘i Passage, a dramatic corridor framed by two monumental mosques, and Dahab Alleyway, a narrow and evocative lane that reveals the layered character of Cairo’s historic districts. The archive concludes with a small group of photographs from Saqqara, where the monumental landscape of ancient Egypt forms a powerful counterpoint to the dense urban environments of the modern city.
Taken together, these images offer more than a collection of photographs; they constitute an architectural and urban archive of Cairo, preserving moments, places, and spatial atmospheres that might otherwise fade from memory. For scholars, collectors, and those interested in the city’s built environment, the archive provides a rare visual record of Cairo at a particular moment in its long and complex history.