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.

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!

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 …

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

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.

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?