
FirstLook: Cairo Cat
- Photography
Photograph by Lorraine Chittock
In any town or city, there are always plenty of reminders that we humans are not the only inhabitants. This is particularly true in Cairo, thanks in great part to cats, who seem to pad and paw their way everywhere. And they have been doing this in Egypt since Pharaonic times, when they were mummified and solemnly interred by the thousands, and the goddess Bastet was depicted first as a lioness and, later, as a domestic cat. Cats have appeared in Egyptian iconography, poetry and literature for millennia, up to modern times.
This tabby, who frequented a tourist shop near Fishawi’s Café, a favorite of Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, acted like she knew all this history by heart. As she pranced over the souvenir sphinxes, Nefertitis and Tuts, I could sense her almost demanding her portrait be taken. I complied. She stared down the camera as if she had been studying the stone faces around her all her life.
—Lorraine Chittock www.CairoCats.com
This tabby, who frequented a tourist shop near Fishawi’s Café, a favorite of Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, acted like she knew all this history by heart. As she pranced over the souvenir sphinxes, Nefertitis and Tuts, I could sense her almost demanding her portrait be taken. I complied. She stared down the camera as if she had been studying the stone faces around her all her life.
—Lorraine Chittock www.CairoCats.com
You may also be interested in...
Spotlight on Photography: Discover the Marshes of Iraq in a Visual Story by Wilfred Thesiger
“In the Marshes of Iraq” — November/December 1966All the Lands Were Sea
In late 1967, photographer Tor Eigoland traveled for more than: a month, mostly by canoe, among the countless villages of southern Iraq's vast marshes. Now, 45 years later, writer Anthony Sattin calls his photographs a "rare and ethnographic record of a lost world. They bring us back to a time and place where people lived in harmony with their environment and respected the balance the natural world needs to thrive.'FirstLook: Ramadan Picnic
On a warm June evening, people gathered at a park in Bethesda, Maryland, for a community potluck dinner welcoming the start of Ramadan.