Egypt, Chapter II — Marsa Alam by Day and the Privilege of Being Allowed to Get It Wrong
The night before, I had left my desires with the sea.
The sea had not given them back.
The next morning, Marsa Alam presented me with the bill.
It did not arrive in an envelope.
It had no letterhead, bank details, or deadline printed in red beneath some threat written in type small enough to look legal.
It wore the face of men hanging from scaffolding.
Hands stained with paint.
Feet balanced on wooden planks.
Backs bent.
And, harder still to bear, a smile.
The first chapter had been a prayer.
The second was an invoice.
The city began far from the city.
Earth.
Stones.
Antennas.
A line of sea barely visible behind a landscape that seemed to have been scraped to the bone.
There were no trees large enough to hide anything. No woods, no fog, no vegetation willing to soften the border between what existed and what was missing.
The desert possesses no diplomacy.
It shows everything.
The emptiness.
The roads.
The isolated buildings.
The towers that let phones work even in the middle of nowhere, because humanity can evidently do without water, shade, and sometimes dignity, but not without checking who viewed an Instagram story.
In the distance was the sea.
The day before, I had gazed at it as though it were a god.
From there it looked like nothing more than a blue strip behind an unfinished parking lot.
Even gods lose a great deal of their charm when viewed from behind.
Two camels walked along the asphalt.
They wore colorful saddles and the customary expression of civil servants asked to do something five minutes before lunch.
Behind them were white buildings, domes, the sea.
Vehicles passed beside them.
Different centuries forced to share the same lane.
Egypt had passed through pharaohs, empires, religions, wars, and invasions to arrive at last at the historic moment when a camel can be overtaken by a minibus full of tourists photographing it through dirty glass.
Progress is a complicated affair.
A little farther on, an ATV traveled down a dirt road.
Tiny inside an enormous expanse.
At first it looked like a toy some gigantic child had forgotten in the landscape. Then I saw that someone was actually on it, swallowed by the scale of the earth.
The roads did not always lead somewhere.
Some seemed to have been drawn solely to keep the desert from having the last word.
One bend.
Then another.
Asphalt appearing, vanishing, and beginning again farther ahead.
We build roads because emptiness makes us uneasy.
We need lines.
Arrows.
Signs.
Someone to tell us where to turn.
The desert, on the other hand, suggests nothing.
You can go in any direction.
That is precisely the problem.
Absolute freedom sounds magnificent until you realize no one is coming to explain what the fuck you are supposed to do with it.
I climbed into a vehicle.
From that moment on, Marsa Alam began to appear through the windows.
Trucks.
Minibuses.
Motorcycles.
Roads.
Men talking to drivers while leaning against their doors, as though every journey had to begin with a negotiation, a piece of information exchanged, or at least a conversation long enough to make everyone forget why they had stopped.
A man crossed the parking lot holding a bottle.
Behind him waited white vehicles, loads strapped to their roofs, doors open, and drivers who seemed to know exactly where they were going.
I was still searching for a mission in life.
They could at least find the road to the next village.
That already seemed like a considerable advantage.
On the dashboard were a small astronaut carrying the Egyptian flag and some kind of stuffed animal peeking out from behind the seat.
A pocket universe.
The desert outside.
Space within.
That astronaut caught my attention.
He wore a helmet, a suit, and protective gear.
He stood perhaps four inches tall and was probably the best-equipped person I saw all day.
Human beings personalize everything.
A truck.
A dashboard.
A wall.
A bucket.
If the world insists on treating you like an extra, you hang something, paint a name, paste up a picture, and say: this piece of chaos is mine.
It does not have to be elegant.
Elegance is a concern for people who already own enough space to afford minimalism.
When you have little, you fill it.
Colors.
Good-luck charms.
Photographs.
Fringe.
Plastic animals.
An Egyptian astronaut swaying above a potholed road.
It is not bad taste.
It is a declaration of ownership.
Perhaps I do not own the world, but I own this dashboard.
The driver drove.
Now and then he spoke.
Now and then he picked up his phone.
Outside, the road crossed bare mountains and expanses of gravel. A truck approached from the opposite direction. A motorcycle moved ahead of us. Utility poles marched across the desert with the discipline of a very thin army.
The phone remained in the driver’s hand.
He looked at the road.
He looked at the screen.
Back to the road.
Meanwhile, the highway code had probably applied for political asylum in Europe.
And yet the vehicle kept moving.
I kept taking pictures.
I do not know which of us was engaged in the more idiotic activity.
At least he had to get us somewhere.
I was risking a head-on collision for a nicely composed windshield.
On the roadside I found an enormous abandoned tire.
It rested in the sand like the remains of some extinct mechanical creature. A truck passed behind it.
Something had continued the journey without it.
I wondered how many things we leave along the road because they are no longer useful to the version of ourselves that keeps going.
Friendships.
Promises.
Ideals.
Pieces of our character.
Sometimes even people.
We keep moving and call everything we had to abandon in order not to stop growth.
The tire stayed there.
It did not have a sad story.
It was rubber.
I am the one incapable of encountering a piece of trash in the desert without diagnosing it with abandonment issues.
Farther on were scraps, wood, metal, and the remains of something that might have been dismantled, built, or simply forgotten.
A person walked among the debris.
I did not know what he was looking for.
I did not know whether he was working.
The desert has a peculiar ability to make every object look final.
An empty bottle in a city is garbage.
An empty bottle in the desert looks like evidence from a crime scene.
A building still bore the sign of a pharmacy.
*Grand Apotheke.*
Important words above a shuttered, faded structure surrounded by dust.
It looked like the promise of a cure made by someone who had left before the patients arrived.
It made me smile.
There was something perfectly human in that presumption: building a pharmacy in the middle of nowhere and even calling it *Grand*.
Not just any pharmacy.
A grand pharmacy.
Civilization may collapse, but marketing must maintain certain standards.
A short while later, I came upon the men on the scaffolding.
One was climbing along the wall.
No helmet.
No safety belt.
No harness.
No shoes engineered by a German company after seventeen years of research into ankle stability.
There were metal pipes.
Wooden planks.
A rope.
And his body.
The entire safety system consisted of him trying not to fall.
I photographed him from below.
He leaned out.
He saw me.
And raised his thumb.
He was smiling.
The universal gesture meaning everything was fine.
Or that he had seen the camera.
Or that, for those five seconds, he had decided to grant me an image other than exhaustion.
I did not know.
A photograph records one hundredth of a second and then claims to bear witness to an entire life.
It is an arrogant little motherfucker.
Another man was working nearby.
Clothes covered in dust.
A bucket.
The paint.
The hands.
Below him, empty space.
He looked at me too.
He smiled too.
Then he sat on a plank about as wide as God’s remaining patience after creating humanity.
His posture was relaxed.
One foot braced.
His body accustomed to being where I would have demanded a certified platform, three guardrails, life insurance, and perhaps my mother praying underneath.
I took another picture.
The light was perfect.
The sky blue.
The walls pale.
Dust on his clothes.
His face open.
Photographically, it was beautiful.
And that was exactly what made me uncomfortable.
Beauty knows how to make almost anything acceptable.
A war in the right light becomes an award-winning photograph.
Poverty inside a good composition becomes authenticity.
A man on dangerous scaffolding, if he smiles, immediately becomes proof that one can be happy with very little.
It is one of our favorite lines.
“They have nothing, yet they smile.”
We say it with a kind of spiritual relief, as though other people’s happiness could absolve us of the conditions in which they are forced to look for it.
They have nothing, yet they smile.
Perfect.
Then perhaps they do not need more.
They have no protective gear, yet they smile.
Magnificent.
Then safety becomes a Western indulgence.
They are poor, but they look happy.
Lucky bastards.
We can keep photographing them without feeling too guilty.
No.
A smile is not a certificate of well-being.
It does not measure a person’s peace of mind, the quality of his home, or the fear with which his wife waits while he works several yards above the ground on a piece of wood.
Happiness cannot be diagnosed by looking at someone’s teeth.
Perhaps those men were happy.
Perhaps they had families they loved.
Perhaps they laughed constantly.
Perhaps that day was even pleasant.
But their smiles did not make the scaffolding safe.
They did not turn necessity into choice.
They did not erase the difference between their bodies and mine.
I owned a camera that probably cost more than they would earn in well over a year of work.
I had lenses.
Spare batteries.
Duplicate memory cards.
Once home, I would archive those images on several drives.
Perhaps two.
Perhaps three.
Because a serious photographer must always have a backup.
They, on the other hand, had only one back.
One head.
Two legs with no backup copies.
I could lose a photograph and recover it from the NAS.
If one of them fell, no technician could reconstruct the original file.
That was when I understood something I had never clearly put into words.
Poverty is not merely owning less.
It is having less room for error.
A rich man can make a bad choice and call it experience.
He can lose money and begin again.
He can quit a job, move to another city, hire a lawyer, get treatment at a clinic, spend a few months producing nothing, and announce that he has taken time off to find himself.
A poor man takes one wrong step and may lose the leg he used to earn his living.
The difference is not merely what we have.
It is how many times we can afford to fall.
I had been given second chances.
Third ones too.
I had probably wasted some precisely because, in some hidden corner of myself, I knew another would come.
When the world cushions the consequences often enough, you keep jumping off the couch convinced someone has arranged pillows on the floor.
Those men had no pillows.
They had learned not to fall.
It was not moral superiority.
They were not wiser because they risked breaking their necks.
Necessity does not make people better.
It makes you necessary.
It is a distinction we travelers forget when we turn other people’s survival into an intensive course in gratitude.
I realized I was torn.
Part of me wanted to denounce what I saw.
Another part was drawn to the power of the images.
That is the problem with documentary photography.
You stand before something unjust and, at the very moment you feel disturbed, a professional voice inside your head whispers:
Beautiful light.
Excellent geometry.
Wait until he turns.
Perfect.
Shoot.
It is a useful voice.
It is also a bitch.
A photographer can care sincerely about a person and still keep searching for the best angle on his risk.
Compassion does not automatically switch off the light meter.
So what was I doing?
Bearing witness?
Stealing?
Making those men visible, or turning them into material for my story?
Probably all of those things at once.
Pure intentions belong to saints, liars, and authorized biographies.
I was none of the three.
I could not save them.
The camera was not an ambulance.
It could not build a guardrail.
It could not offer a better contract.
It could not catch a man as he fell.
All it could do was say: this existed.
These men were here.
These were the conditions.
These were their faces.
And yes, they smiled.
But the smile belonged to them.
It was not our absolution.
I have never handled powerlessness well.
Seeing something wrong immediately awakens that masculine, stupid, well-intentioned part of me that wants to intervene, protect, repair, and find a solution before the episode ends.
We want to be the man who arrives.
The one who knows what to do.
The one strong enough to move the problem, rich enough to pay it away, or important enough to call the right person.
Then life places us before situations in which we have no power.
We are not heroes.
We are witnesses.
And bearing witness feels like too little.
Almost an elegant form of cowardice.
But perhaps not everything we cannot save must be abandoned to silence.
Perhaps there is a smaller, less cinematic responsibility.
To look without lying.
Not to turn suffering into folklore.
Not to use other people’s dignity to feel more spiritually evolved.
And above all, not to mistake a smile for permission to turn away.
A tanker truck was parked beside a wall.
Blue.
Red.
White.
Decorated with lettering, drawings, and even the name Mercedes-Benz, because even a dust-covered work vehicle retains the right to harbor aesthetic ambitions greater than its mechanical condition.
A man sat on top of the tank.
He was smiling.
The truck looked dressed for a party to which good taste had not been invited.
It was marvelous.
We imagine poverty devoid of beauty.
As though color arrived only after every basic need had been met and the accountant had granted approval.
But human beings decorate before they are even safe.
They draw on trucks.
They hang things from dashboards.
They paint doors.
They embroider clothes.
Not because beauty solves hunger or prevents a fall.
Because an existence reduced to necessity alone becomes a prison.
The useless is a form of resistance.
One more color.
A line of lettering.
A design painted on a tanker.
Something that says: I am not only the work I do.
There were animals near the houses.
A small cat played with a hand.
It rolled in the dust, seized the fingers, and bared tiny teeth with the seriousness of a ferocious beast that had not yet received the memo regarding its size.
The hand petting the cat might be the same one that, a few hours later, would lift a bucket, drive a truck, or repair a wall.
It reminded me that no one is merely the work he does.
Worker.
Poor.
Bricklayer.
Driver.
Useful words for arranging people inside a text.
But a person does not live inside a category.
He pets a cat.
Tells a joke.
Falls in love with the wrong person.
Fears something he never mentions.
Knows a song.
Goes home.
Wastes time.
Desires.
Photography constantly risks reducing a life to the gesture it happened to encounter.
A bricklayer remains a bricklayer forever.
A vendor keeps selling even when the photograph hangs on a wall halfway across the world.
But outside the frame, he washes.
Eats.
Sleeps.
Perhaps embraces someone.
Perhaps swears.
Perhaps dreams of an entirely different job.
The picture preserves the role.
The person continues.
Old pickup trucks passed through the streets.
Men climbed into their beds, loaded containers, spoke through windows, and moved from one building to another.
The vehicles had colors faded by the sun, dents, and repairs that told of a long negotiation with mechanical death.
They were not collector’s cars.
No one had aged them artificially to lend them character.
They had simply kept serving.
In the first chapter, I had searched for signs in the sea.
Here, the signs were on the bodywork.
Scratches.
Rust.
Mismatched paint.
Every repair said replacement had not been the first option.
Perhaps not even the second.
But I did not want to construct another romantic theory about the virtue of old things.
A beat-up car is not more authentic.
It is simply closer to the moment when it stops working.
The person driving it has not necessarily rejected consumerism.
He may simply be unable to afford anything better.
Even necessity can look like a philosophy when viewed from the proper distance.
The road kept returning.
Asphalt amid the earth.
Isolated cars.
A bird crossing the frame.
A huge arrow pointed toward a bend, as though the only thing that truly mattered was keeping people from driving straight into the desert.
I saw a small three-wheeled vehicle cross the road carrying some kind of load.
It moved slowly.
It looked like the illicit offspring of a motorcycle, a truck, and a decision made after the spare parts ran out.
It made it across all the same.
Almost everything there seemed to work through sheer stubbornness.
Not efficiently.
Not elegantly.
Stubbornly.
Human beings often work that way too.
We continue not because we have healed, found motivation, or finally made peace with ourselves.
We continue because it is morning.
Because someone is waiting for us.
Because bread has to be bought.
Because stopping would require an amount of energy we do not possess.
Stubbornness is hope’s less photogenic sister.
It does not talk about dreams.
It does not post motivational quotes.
It gets up and starts the wreck.
I found a plastic bottle in the sand.
It bore the disability symbol.
I stood looking at it.
A symbol of accessibility discarded beside a road in a place where men worked barefoot on suspended planks.
Irony, when it wants to be, is one remarkably talented bitch.
We had learned to print the right symbol.
We still had to build the world that went with it.
A little farther on, I saw the ATV.
This time it was near the houses.
A child was driving.
Another child sat behind him, holding on with a natural ease that would have sent any Western parent equipped with an approved helmet, insurance policy, and school WhatsApp group into nervous collapse.
The ATV traveled over the dirt.
No one seemed especially alarmed.
For us, a vehicle like that is entertainment.
A weekend.
An activity sold with a signed waiver and a photograph at the end.
There it might also be transportation.
Habit.
Education.
I did not know the story of those children, and I did not want to declare them freer simply because they had more opportunities to break an arm.
Freedom is not measured by the number of dangers adults have forgotten to remove.
But their bodies held an early competence.
The way they sat on the machine.
The way they looked ahead.
The way they shared the space.
Perhaps they had learned early that adults’ tools do not remain toys for long.
I looked at that child and thought of myself.
I was still trying to work out how to become an adult without feeling betrayed by the process.
He was already driving someone.
It was an unfair comparison.
Age does not tell the whole story.
Some children are granted years to play, while some adults keep being forgiven for their irresponsibility.
Others receive a vehicle, a task, a brother to carry, and a road on which they must not make a mistake far too soon.
It does not mean they are better.
It means the margin for error was distributed differently.
Second chances do not fall from the sky in equal numbers.
Some are born surrounded by safety nets.
Others learn balance.
We entered a construction area.
Stone arches.
Unfinished walls.
Repeating columns.
Glassless windows through which excavators, minibuses, mountains, and more dust appeared.
The buildings looked ancient before they were even finished.
Egypt has that talent.
It can build something on Tuesday and make it look as though it has survived three dynasties by Friday.
The men pushed wheelbarrows.
They carried tiles, buckets, blocks, and planks.
They walked through the site in stained clothes and dust-covered shoes.
One wore a high-visibility vest.
At least danger would have been able to spot him more easily.
I photographed them from above.
Three men around a wheelbarrow.
One pushed.
The others helped.
Their work possessed a choreography.
Not the flawless choreography of companies that make promotional videos with clean helmets, coordinated uniforms, and an executive pretending to know the worker’s name.
It was a choreography learned through repetition.
One takes.
One lifts.
One passes.
The body knows when to move.
The arms know the weight.
Exhaustion becomes a shared language.
I would have needed to ask for instructions.
They understood one another through gesture.
One man carried buckets of paint and materials down the passageway.
The others followed behind him.
The walls held different layers of color, plaster, and work still waiting to be finished.
Once the building was complete, no one would see those days.
Guests would walk down the corridor.
They would judge the room.
Too small.
Too hot.
Too far from the pool.
Someone would complain about a mark on the wall without ever imagining the face of the man who had painted it.
That is the magic of work done well.
It makes the person who did it disappear.
We see the wall.
Not the bricklayer.
The floor.
Not the back.
The clean room.
Not the hands that made it so.
Comfort is a crime with no visible corpse.
Everything works, so no one asks who paid for that functioning with his body.
A young man appeared among the columns.
In one photograph he was far away, wedged inside the repetition of the arches.
In the next, he was closer.
He was looking down.
Working.
The building’s geometry surrounded him.
Lines.
Rectangles.
Openings.
He seemed already absorbed by the structure he was helping to build.
I thought of how many people spend their lives building places they will never be able to afford to stay in.
Hotels.
Houses.
Resorts.
Villas.
The hands enter before the owners.
They lay every surface.
Touch every wall.
Then leave through the service entrance.
No conspiracy is required.
A contract will do.
Another man worked on a plank.
The photograph showed only his feet.
Bare.
Skin against wood.
Beside them, a bucket of paint.
No face.
No smile capable of making the scene more reassuring.
Only feet and empty space.
That image struck me more than the others.
A face distracts us.
We look for emotion.
Likability.
Dignity.
The foot, by contrast, told the fact.
Had it lost its grip, the poetry would have ended very quickly.
I thought of my insurance policies.
The padded cases.
The filters in front of my lenses.
The bags designed to protect a camera from a fall of a few inches.
My equipment traveled more safely than that man.
A lens had a hood.
He did not have a helmet.
It was not my fault.
But pretending it had nothing to do with me would have been dishonest.
Privilege is not always something we have stolen directly.
Sometimes it is what benefits us without requiring us to know who paid for it.
A room ready for us.
A paved road.
A painted building.
A clean bus.
Someone bent down.
Someone lifted.
Someone breathed dust.
Someone risked falling.
We arrive later, once the danger has been removed along with the workers.
Perhaps that is where the debt begins.
Not in the useless sense of guilt.
Guilt by itself is often nothing more than privilege continuing to stare at its own reflection.
You feel bad.
You talk about how bad you feel.
Then order another drink.
Debt is different.
Debt demands memory.
It asks us to stop treating comfort as a natural phenomenon.
It asks us to look at a wall and know it did not grow out of the ground.
Someone built it.
A tractor crossed the road.
Then I saw two more parked near the white domes.
Enormous wheels.
Worn paint.
Machines born to move earth in a place that seemed to possess an unlimited supply.
A carriage appeared a short while later.
A camel.
Thin wheels.
Another way of moving through the same landscape.
Tractor.
Pickup.
Motorcycle.
ATV.
Camel.
Minibus.
Marsa Alam had not chosen an era.
It used them all.
Modernity had not replaced what came before.
It had sat down beside it, taking up space and making noise.
Two men were talking beside a bus.
One wore a dark uniform.
The other a reflective vest.
Their hands met in front of the windshield.
Perhaps they were discussing a mechanical problem.
Perhaps a route.
Perhaps they were simply greeting each other.
I watched them through another pane of glass.
Separated once again.
Protected.
Street photography often consists of this: being close enough to see and far enough away not to belong.
You enter other people’s days for a fraction of a second.
Take a gesture.
A face.
A relationship.
Then continue on.
A photographer is a thief who, on his best days, at least leaves a testimony in place of what he took.
But I did not want merely to collect men at work.
I wanted to understand why I kept looking for them.
Why, before a landscape, my gaze almost always came to rest on a person.
Perhaps because natural beauty does not need to be understood.
The sea is beautiful.
The desert is immense.
The sky changes color.
The end.
Human beings, on the other hand, are walking contradictions.
They take risks and laugh.
They suffer and pet a cat.
They own almost nothing and decorate a truck as though it were taking the pharaoh to history’s final rave.
They build hotels where they will never stay.
They let children drive machines too large for them.
They cross empty roads.
They greet one another.
They give one another shit.
They continue.
I photographed them because I was still trying to understand myself.
Not my mission.
Not this time.
Something more uncomfortable.
How much of the person I believed myself to be depended simply on the margin for error I had been given?
I considered myself free.
But how much of my freedom had been financed by the possibility that I would not plummet after every wrong decision?
I considered myself creative.
But how much creativity depends on having time, space, and the certainty that you will still eat when inspiration decides to go fuck someone else?
I considered myself sensitive because I photographed men on scaffolding.
But what is sensitivity worth if it does not even change the way we tell what we have seen?
I found no answers.
I found a boundary.
I would not write that they were happy because they smiled.
I would not call a lack of protection freedom.
I would not turn need into purity.
And I would not pretend my camera made me innocent.
It was not much.
But at least it was something I could do without lying.
The sun began to sink.
The city turned yellow.
The domes, palms, vehicles, and walls absorbed a dirty light streaked with dust.
For a few minutes, everything looked precious.
Even the unfinished surfaces.
Even the trucks.
Even the excavated earth.
Light does not discriminate.
It illuminates the villa and the shack.
The tourist and the bricklayer.
The resort window and the foot on the plank.
We are the ones who decide which parts to photograph and which to leave outside the frame.
Just before the day disappeared, I saw a container filled with yellow powder.
Perhaps a spice.
A metal spoon had been left inside.
A simple lever.
Something designed to scoop, weigh, and sell.
After a day spent before roads, men, vehicles, and construction sites, the final image was a gesture that was not taking place.
The spoon waited.
Sooner or later, everything is measured.
Gasoline.
Paint.
Cement.
Food.
Hours of work.
A taxi ride.
A room with a view.
Even a photograph can be given a price, sold, and hung on an elegant wall far enough away from the place where it was taken.
But there was no scale for what I had seen.
No unit of measure for the distance between a helmet and a bare head.
For the amount of future contained in a back.
For the cost of a mistake when you cannot afford another.
For the kindness of a hand that, after lifting buckets, still finds the gentleness required to pet a cat.
Nor for that smile.
That smile did not prove those men needed little.
It did not say poverty was dignified.
Dignity was not a prize awarded to them for bearing hardship well.
They did not have to earn it by looking happy in my photographs.
It was already theirs.
The smile said only that, in that precise instant, they had decided exhaustion would not possess their entire face.
It was a small thing.
But it was theirs.
And the world had no right to use it as an alibi.
The day ended.
The spoon remained buried in the powder.
Ready to weigh almost everything.
Not the debt.
That had no measure.
But by then it was traveling with me.