Quiet hours in the Old World.

Five years of slow looking

This is the work of five years across Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia and India — almost always alone, sometimes from rooftops and balconies I had to talk my way onto.

I'm drawn to the moments when a place stops performing for the visitor and just exists. A woman in red who walks across the marble at the Taj exactly once, while the haze softens the building into something almost imagined. A rooftop in Najaf I navigated my way onto an hour before maghrib, just in time to watch the courtyard outside the shrine of Imam Ali fill with thousands of pilgrims sitting down to break their fast together. A man at a Cairo flea market who has sat on the same chair, in front of the same Bakelite radios and rotary telephones, for decades — and who only wanted to tell me how long he'd been there.

The work is patient. I'll wait an hour, sometimes two, for one figure to pass through the right doorway, or for the light to find the gold in the muqarnas of an old mosque. Most of the photographs in this collection are the only frames I made of the scene they record.

Every print is produced in the UK on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 — 100% cotton, archival, museum-grade — with pigment inks rated beyond a hundred years. Limited editions are hand-signed and numbered with a certificate of authenticity. Rolled in an acid-free archival tube, tracked worldwide.