Walking Giza

During my 2020 residency in Cairo, there were days when the city itself became the destination, and others when I simply wanted to see what lay beyond the streets I had come to know.

One of those journeys took me to Giza.

I decided to make the journey by train. Perhaps because I was already spending so much of my time walking through Cairo, taking the train offered another way of experiencing the city and its surroundings. I wasn't simply travelling towards the pyramids. I was watching the landscape change along the way.

The Journey

The train became part of the experience. As we moved through the city, I found myself paying attention to the details that I might otherwise have missed. Station names and signposts appeared in Arabic. For someone unfamiliar with the script, they became visual markers rather than words I could immediately understand.

I could recognise that I was moving from one place to another, but I couldn't always read the names of those places.

Something was interesting about that. As a photographer, I am used to observing places through visual clues. Architecture, signs, streets and landscapes often tell me where I am before I know anything else about them. In Cairo, the Arabic script became part of that visual landscape.

The train stops became a sequence of images. One sign. Then another. A station. People getting on and off. Buildings passing outside the window. It was another reminder that travelling through a place can be as revealing as arriving at a destination.

Arriving at Giza

And then there were the pyramids. Nothing quite prepares you for seeing them in person.

I had seen photographs of the pyramids all my life. They are among the most recognisable structures in the world, so familiar that it can be easy to forget their scale and their presence.

Standing there was different. I had to kneel and thank God for such a milestone.

The pyramids were no longer photographs in books or images on a screen. They were physical, enormous and part of a landscape that people still move through every day. I walked around them with my camera, trying to understand how to photograph something that has already been photographed countless times.

Perhaps the answer was not to search for the definitive image, but simply to experience the place.

The Great Pyramid, the other pyramids, the surrounding structures and the desert landscape all formed part of the experience. I was interested not only in the monuments themselves, but also in the spaces between them, the people moving through them and the relationship between these ancient structures and the modern city beyond.

The Sphinx

The Sphinx offered another encounter. Its scale felt different from the pyramids, but its presence was just as powerful. Standing before it, I found myself thinking about how much time these monuments had witnessed.

Cities have layers. In Kampala, I often photograph buildings that are decades or a century old, trying to understand the histories contained within them. In Giza, I was confronted with a landscape whose history stretches back thousands of years.

The difference in scale was enormous, but the impulse was familiar.

I wanted to look closely. I wanted to understand what it meant for these monuments to still exist, to still be visited, photographed, and interpreted, while the city around them continued to change.

Beyond the Photograph

The journey to Giza became more than a visit to the pyramids. It was another lesson in how I experience places.

The train journey, the Arabic signs, the changing landscape, the first sight of the pyramids and the encounter with the Sphinx all became part of one continuous experience. I had gone looking for the monuments, but I found myself photographing the journey as much as the destination. That is something I have come to appreciate about travelling.

The destination may be what brings you there, but the journey often gives you the stories. Looking back, I remember Giza not only as a place of ancient monuments, but as a day of movement and observation.

A train carrying me through an unfamiliar landscape. Arabic signs marking places I could not yet read.

And then, suddenly, the pyramids. Some places announce themselves long before you arrive. Others reveal themselves only when you stop, look and allow yourself to experience them. Giza was both.