This book contains haunting and lyrical photographs of the theater of rural Egyptian life.In this beautiful art book, award-winning American photographer Ann Parker records and celebrates life as it passes along a road through a typical village in the Egyptian Nile Delta in the early twenty-first century. But her photographs are not mere documents of a specific time and place; they transcend both as she captures timeless moments in an eternal world and presents us with a potentially infinite and hauntingly memorable pageant of living tableaux, silhouetted against the late afternoon sky.Day after day, in the same few hours of the lowering sun, from the same single vantage point on a wooden bench outside the house of the village mayor, Parker sat patiently waiting for figures and events to come together in what Henri Cartier-Bresson called "the decisive moment" on the road in front of her, framed by the trunks of two trees and curtained by their delicate branches. The result is this extraordinary collection of images-one hundred sepia prints filled with the comings and goings of the village's people, animals, and vehicles.
Like a spectator seated in a theater, Ann Parker watched the telling procession pass by on the road. She has succeeded in documenting with artistry what remains of a rich traditional life in one of the most historic farming areas of the world, and with this exquisite book in hand we too may enjoy the privilege of sitting quietly beside her on the mayor's bench.