Before going to Egypt, I was told that taking pictures would be hard, if not impossible. Ok, I said, let’s do a project about not doing it, then. But in Cairo it proved to be all wrong: I was stopped in the streets by young guys asking me to take their picture. An old man biking over the bridge crossing the Nile in heavy traffic shouted out »Welcome to Egypt!«. Another man hung out from the bus to ensure that I could take his picture. No shortage of photo opportunities — people even took instructions! And never demanded to see the result.

But, as a friend of mine asked later: »Are there no women in Cairo?«. Good question.

I’ve been to Palestine and Israel before, but this time the theme was animal movement. We met with Bedouins and saw camels living in suburbs, and camels living next to restricted areas, where it was no good idea to wander too far if you didn’t want to be a target of a bored Israeli soldier with a machine gun …

Meteora doesn’t always feel real, and sometimes the place actually is fiction — both James Bond and Tintin have been seen being filmed there.

Also worship doesn’t look the way it used to: pilgrims now come on motorbikes from Eastern Europe. Or maybe it’s just the religion that has changed? And today is called tourism?

Istanbul has been about carpets, about selling, repairing and marvelling them, and about the Grand Bazaar. But we also had a angle that might one day be a bigger project, a book perhaps? We circled the bazaar early in the morning, and again later when the commerce was full on, went in and out and around (and sometimes got lost while looking for) the 21 gates. While we were looking, we were told that there actually is a 22nd gate! To be continued, for sure.

Tunis was a short stop-over en route from Cairo to Genova. We lived inside the medina, and visited those markets, but also the ones outside the old city, and took the local train to the coast town La Marsa.

It was Ramadan. One night after sunset we ate something awful at a gourmet restaurant, and the next night something wonderful at a long table outdoors on the pavement. Afterwards we went for coffee to a place where men drank tea and coffee and shouted and played cards and banged their fists in metal tables and dragged the metal tables around. There was a large tv screen with Champions League football on, but very few were watching and no-one for sure was listening. And all through this we were politely served and after that equally politely ignored. Soon we were shouting too, and by then the cigarette smoke had grown too thick and we were laughing too hard, and had to say good night an leave. That place was the best of the whole trip.

I feel good in Beirut. For me it’s like being in New York or in Cyprus; you’re in the USA, but not really, or among Greeks, but not actually in Greece. Beirut is in the Middle East, but diluted, mixed and blended: there’s room for me as well; even though I don’t belong I am made to feel as if I do. Maybe it is because I have belonged to a minority all my life (well two, for half my life) that these are the places I thrive in, the places where everyone is a little bit a stranger and no-one is it totally. The melting pots, the hubs, the half-ways.

In Beirut I photographed public spaces: the beaches, the Corniche, the parks.

We also visited the Palestinian refuge camp in Bourj el-Barajneh where I couldn’t always take pictures of people. And when I went through the memory card back at the hotel I swore out loud: the young man in one of the pictures that I was happy about had decided to put on a t-shirt with the text ‘pervert’. Couldn’t you have dressed differently just that day! (And no way I will put that picture out on the internet.)

Marseille is chansons and Algerian rai and disco pop and lullabies. Sometimes. For most of the time Marseille is pure punk.

Off-season in a little Greek town is a poem about absent friends, a poisonous snake and laundry drying in the wind.

Melilla is a small Spanish enclave on the Morroccan coast, the size of it only 12 square kilometers (even though square sounds wrong here, the shape of Melilla is oval). It’s surrounded by 6 meter high fences, and the moment you jump over you are on EU ground.

Every day people are carrying enormous bundles — sometimes weighing as much as 80 kg — on their backs over the border from Melilla to Morocco. It’s dangerous, it’s hectic, and of course the people who carry the load don’t get much of the profit.

What intrigued me in Melilla was the fact that the seashore is also the border, standing at the water’s edge I have one foot in Morocco and one in Spain. Also the fish sold in the market have been brought in by trucks — as a Melillan you cannot fish in Moroccan waters.

When I started as a photographer I did portraits. Never in a studio, often in people’s homes, or outside in the street, or in the greenhouses of botanical gardens. I did them for newspapers and publishing houses and publications and also for Amnesty International, and after a while no-one ever asked me to do anything else. I loved it, but sometimes grew frustrated: I do know how to point my lens in other directions!

But now it’s the opposite: I very seldom am asked to do portraits. But when someone does, I still know how to do it!