The Collection
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. The light through the haze in Cairo on a winter afternoon. A woman in red who walks across the marble at the Taj exactly once, while the mist holds its shape against the dome longer than it should. 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.
Egypt, Iraq, Oman,
Saudi Arabia, India
All ten prints in this collection are made in the Islamic world — Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia — with three made in India. That’s deliberate. This isn’t a collection about travel in any general sense. It’s about a specific part of the world, its specific light, and the specific quality of life that survives in its oldest places.
Cairo appears three times — in the pyramids, on a rooftop, in a flea market — because it’s the city I keep returning to. It’s one of the most photogenic places on earth and one of the least photographed honestly.
Ten photographs
Most of the photographs in this collection are the only frames I made of the scene they record. There was no second attempt, no return visit. The work is slow until it isn’t — and then you have one moment.
Limited editions
Four photographs. Hand-signed and numbered. Edition of 25 across all sizes. Certificate of authenticity included. Prices rise as editions sell.
Open editions
Six photographs. Available in an unlimited run in three sizes — A3, A2 and A1. Printed to the same standard on the same paper.
Maisum — IG: @mais
maisumwaljiphotography@gmail.com