Walking the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities
During my 2020 residency in Cairo, I spent much of my time moving through the city on foot. The streets were becoming a kind of open archive for me—buildings, bridges, people, signs, and everyday details all offering different ways of understanding the city.
The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities offered another kind of walk. Inside, the scale of the collection changes the way you move. Room after room holds objects from another time: statues, carved figures, fragments, jewellery, and objects that have survived thousands of years. I found myself moving slowly, stopping often, looking at details that might otherwise be easy to miss.
As a photographer, I was drawn to the relationship between the objects and the spaces around them. The museum itself became part of the experience: the high ceilings, the long corridors, the light falling across the galleries, and the way visitors moved among objects from an ancient world.
Something was striking about standing in front of an object made thousands of years ago and looking at it through a camera.
A Visual Journey Through the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities
I often photograph buildings because they hold traces of history. In the museum, those traces were no longer embedded only in architecture. They were objects themselves—carved, shaped and preserved, carrying evidence of people and cultures that existed long before the city I was walking through.
The museum made me think about time differently. In Kampala, I might photograph a building that is fifty or a hundred years old and wonder about the people who designed it, used it, or passed through it. In Cairo, I was standing before objects that belonged to histories measured in thousands of years.
Yet the impulse was the same.
Look closely. Pay attention. Try to understand what a place is telling you.
For me, visiting the Egyptian Museum was not simply about seeing ancient objects. It became another form of walking through history one room, one object, and one detail at a time.
