The still unfinished photographic series Cairo is a type of subjective documentary about the city and its cultural environment. The photographs do not aspire to capture the city‘s rich history, the diversity in architecture or to reflect life on the streets. What is important here is the personal encounter with the city, which never sleeps, and whose foundations contain layers of prehistoric settle-ment, 5 millennia of ancient Egyptian civilisation, the beginnings of Christianity and Islam.
When I first walked the streets of Cairo in 2017, I was filled with a sense of my own insignificance. An existential void. Crowded among people, accompanied by loud chatter, gestures, car noises, the sour smell mixed from food, garbage, diesel engines, through streets filled with smoky smog, markets of fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and live animals.
Photography has the metaphysical power to stop the action.
In the streets I tried not to think. I often let myself be carried away through the streets to get lost. A slow exploration of Cairo based on the principle of coincidence, seemed to me from the beginning the most appropriate way to begin photographing.
