Photo of the Week: Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin

Sunny, warm, but grey. Cairo, flattened into asphalt and concrete. This week's Photo of the Week, selected by anthropologist, curator and photographer Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin, dates back to his early attempts to make sense of a city in constant flux through his own lens. The protagonist is a hulking concrete monument. No people, no decisive moment. Just infrastructure becoming landscape.

Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin is a photographer, curator, and anthropologist based in Cairo. His work is driven by an anthropological inquiry into space, time, and memory, and how we construct our belonging to them. He is currently concerned with exploring the binary of care and conquest in contexts of urban topography, personal histories, and cultural expressions.

His practice is entirely analogue and intentionally slow. He photographs and handprints every image himself. Ebrahim is also the founder of Sūph Books: an independent photobook publisher based in Cairo, Egypt.

The image was exhibited in Bahaa-Eldin's first solo exhibition, What To Do When You Cannot Hold A Mountain Between Your Arms? (2024), at Ard Art Institution. He also previously curated the group exhibition Through the Smog (2024) at AUC Tahrir, which similarly explored Cairo's urban development.