Egyptian Photographer Ahmed Abdelshafi Makes Cairo Stand Still

In a city of over 22 million people, Cairo is a whirlwind of noise and restless movement. There is beauty in this energy, but very little stillness. Yet when you look at the photographs of Ahmed Abdelshafi, stillness is all you see, a man fishing quietly with his children by the Nile, the hazy warmth of the city’s sunrise creeping over its skyline.

This stillness he captures is intentional, a way to manifest moments of calm amidst the movement of his city. “For me,” Abdelshafi tells Cairo Scene, “Cairo is a bit overwhelming. It’s a lot of hustling and bustling. I look for locations and times where it’s not.” Photography provides him with an escape from this, both in the places he seeks out and in the images he captures.

His first means of escape is at dawn, when most of the city is still asleep and the noise drops ever so slightly. At sunrise, the city softens; the bellows of traffic muffle into a faint hum, as packs of sleeping dogs take over the quiet streets.Other escapes take him out of Cairo entirely—usually to Qanater, north of the city, where the Nile splits in two as it enters the Delta. There, “it’s just you and the Nile River flowing,” Abdelshafi says. “You can capture the most insane sunsets and sunrises.” The sun in Abdelshafi’s photos is often the main character. Sometimes it glows boldly over buildings; other times it fades softly in hues of orange and red, outlining dramatic silhouettes of people, pyramids, and horses.

He finds his final escape in the quiet of his home. In these scenes, the main character is his grandmother, whom Abdelshafi describes as his best friend. In photographs of her, you think of your own grandmother as she smiles softly, leaning out the window of her Cairo apartment. These photoshoots are never planned, Abdelshafi explains: “It’s actually unfair for me to take the photo’s credit, she’s just naturally very photogenic.”Abdelshafi has never been a professional photographer. His love for it developed as a young teenager, using borrowed phone cameras. This approach lends itself easily to what is raw and natural—none of his photographs feel staged or forced. Photography, to him, has always been “a way for me to hold a moment”—both in his mind and in his images.

That impulse to hold a moment is, to Abdelshafi, an act of nostalgia—preserving something before it slips away. It’s an emotion that runs through almost everything he shoots. In the stillness of these photos, Egyptians—especially those in the diaspora—find deep resonance. His images of the Nile, Cairo’s beaming sun, and a grandmother leaning from a window reliably draw comments from people who say they feel transported not only back to Egypt, but to a younger version of themselves within it.

On rare occasions, Abdelshafi finds himself amidst the chaos he usually avoids. Al-Mawlid, a cultural celebration marked by dense crowds and collective devotion, is one of the few settings that draws him into the noise, serving as a counterpoint to his quieter work and revealing a second interest beneath it: the connection between people, and between people and their culture.But it is stillness that defines his work. Through his camera, Abdelshafi shares a version of Cairo that exists in his mind, one found at the Nile’s edge, at sunrise, or in the soft expression of his grandmother’s face.