Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Unfocused

This photo has a smudged look which resembles my own unspectacled vision of lights.  Unable to focus, I can’t tell where a light begins and ends.

The photo comes from my father’s war album and has the caption “King Pharouk celebration”, though the name is more commonly spelt Farouk.  At 16 years of age in 1936, he was crowned King of Egypt, its penultimate king.  I’ve searched through Google images for photo clues and found one showing him at a celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, standing near a huge crown with draping lights, as they are in my photo here.  The date would be in the early 1940s.

Though Egypt was neutral for most of World War II, allied troops including Australians were posted there and Egypt thus became a potential target for German and Italian bombing, so cities were blacked out at night. But the extravagant King Farouk who lived a lavish life refused to turn off the lights in his palace in Alexandria.  His fellow Alexandrians were not happy.

King Farouk celebration, Egypt, early 1940s
Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Together

The photo I chose for the ‘Together’ challenge shows soldiers far from home, undoubtedly lonely for family and not wanting to isolate themselves from the local people.

It reminded me of the concluding words of George Sand (pen name of Mme Aurore Dudevant) after spending a couple of months in a deserted monastery in Majorca, separated from almost everyone except her family and her lover, Frédéric Chopin. Two paragraphs express her need, not for solitude, but for companionship:

“In the stormy days of youth, we imagine that solitude is the great refuge against attacks, the great remedy for battle wounds. This is a grave error. Life experience teaches us that when we cannot live in peace with our fellow man, no poetic admiration or pleasures of art are capable of filling the abyss that forms in the depth of our soul.

I had always dreamt of living in the desert, and any simple dreamer will admit he has had the same fantasy. But believe me, my brothers, we have hearts too loving to get by without each other; and the best thing left for us to do is tolerate each other, for we are like children of the same womb who tease, fight and even hit each other, and yet cannot part.”

George Sand, A Winter in Majorca, 1855 (My translation)

AIF soldiers and some local boys, Egypt, 1941/42

Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Sun

I found this photo of the early morning sun over the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, probably Port Said which faces east.  It was taken during the war, in 1941 or 1942.

I selected it because of the sunrays bursting out below darkish clouds.  I love the silhouette of the lamppost and the large tent, but what I love even more is what appears on an image like this, one that I’ve looked at for the past fifty years as a Kodak 4″ x 3″ photo in an album, when I brighten it with an image editor and all the detail of the tents, the lamppost, the fence and the man in white becomes evident.  The scene was captured by a Brownie box camera, but no one back in Australia knew what was below that morning sky, until now.  It’s an exquisite pleasure to draw details from a black and white photo which have hidden there all these years.  See a photo I submitted during the February photo challenge, where some words I had ignored, because barely visible on a tiny photo, became plain as day with a bit of image tweaking.

Here’s the photo for the Sun challenge, as it looks in the album:

Early morning sun, Mediterranean (Port Said?), 1941/42

And below is the photo with adjusted curves.  For me, someone with bad night vision, this is what I imagine it’s like to see in the dark.

Edited image of early morning sun, Mediterranean (Port Said?), 1941/42
Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Two subjects

The subject of this photo is clearly the architecture.  But then, I can’t stop looking at its left edge.  The photo is one of many in my father’s World War II album, from the months when he was in the Middle East, mostly Egypt.  He entitled it “Temple”, though I’m pretty sure the photo was taken in a mosque.

I have a carpet on my floor closely resembling those on the “temple” floor, which makes me feel the 70 years which have passed since the war are nothing in the history of Oriental carpet designs, and nothing in the history of geometrical forms covered in stylised vines and wreaths, all of it hinting at the perfection of God.  The written messages fascinate me, all the more because I can’t read them.

Posted on

Slouch Hat

The photo I submitted for this week’s photo challenge, Journey, reminded me of a poem in my father’s poetry book about the hats in the photo:  The Old Slouch Hat. The name of the hat reflects the way it is worn ‘slouching’ on one side while the other side is often pinned against the crown to allow a rifle to be slung over the shoulder.  It was worn by Australian soldiers in the Boer War and World War I, then again in World War II, and every war since.

The handwriting is my father’s but the words are by a ‘soldier in Tobruk’, Libya.  My transcription follows these images.

First verse of “The Old Slouch Hat” by a soldier in Tobruk, Libya, 1941
Fourth verse of “The Old Slouch Hat” by a soldier in Tobruk, Libya, 1941

 

The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly glamorous,
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly chic.
But there’s something more than beauty,
A glorious tradition,
In the old slouch hat
That will ever to it stick.

*****

The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly elegant,
The old slouch hat,
It might be rather plain.
But it showed the world the stuff
That Aus. sons were made of,
Did the old slouch hat,
And it’s doing it again.

Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Journey

On-board, en route to or from the Middle East, 1941 or 1942

When I chose this photo of soldiers on-board a ship on its way to or from the Middle East in 1941 or 1942, I noticed, for the first time, the hat shadow.  And then I thought about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince.  Perhaps Saint-Exupéry had seen soldiers’ hats when he was in North Africa in the 1930s.  If the on-board photo is flipped horizontally, the shadow looks just like the Little Prince’s “drawing Number One”:

Drawing Number One, "The Little Prince", A. de Saint-Exupéry

If you’ve never read his story, you won’t know that the Little Prince showed the grown-ups his masterpiece and asked them if his drawing scared them.  “Why be scared of a hat?” they asked.  But he tells us, “My drawing was not a picture of a hat.  It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.”

But back to the photo challenge:  these soldiers are going on (or have been on) a journey that most of them will regret.  Yet they look pretty relaxed here.  Actually, pretty hot.  They were probably travelling close to the equator.  My father wrote some poetic lines about the boredom and wretchedness of being on-board a troop ship for weeks at a time.  When you’re 20 years old and volunteer to go abroad to defend your country, it probably feels adventurous.  And then you sail off, no turning back.

Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Arranged

This photo from my father’s war-time album has the caption Brass Worker.  The artisan has arranged his ewer, vases and bowls to appeal to buyers.  The photographer must have noticed the verticals in the scene:  the vertical fluting in the brass work, the long table legs, the artisan’s striped galabeya, the height of his fez, the line of his straight back.

I use this photo as my computer’s wallpaper.  Each time I turn it on, I see a man who is in control, organised, a man who likes to arrange things;  he’s creating something beautiful, requiring a unique skill.  Someone I emulate.

Brass worker, Egypt, c1941
Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Through

I’ve looked at a lot of photos of mosques in the Western Desert – the expansive desert in Libya, just over Egypt’s western border – where I suspect this photo was taken, but couldn’t see one that matched this mosque.  The wall seems to have had its window blown out, and as sometimes happens in photography, something damaged and ugly can be used to make a beautiful image.  A photo of the mosque on its own would not tell as good a story as it does framed by this arched gap.

Western Desert, Egypt/Libya, 1941/42
Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Unusual

Death is something I hate thinking about, let alone writing about.  But when choosing photos from Egypt in 1942, there are so many whose subject is death that I will inevitably have to consider them.  I selected this image which, since my childhood, has always turned me cold but curious, simply because of the caption my father wrote beneath it:  Dead City, Cairo.  Until last week when I was researching the cemetery near the pyramids (see my entry for the ‘Contrast’ challenge), I never knew that Dead City was a cemetery.

Today there are about half a million people living in the City of the Dead due to Cairo’s exploding population. They live in the tomb buildings as slum-dwellers and have no electricity or sanitation.  However, some good people are growing micro-gardens in the Dead City complex which give the residents a way to produce some food for themselves and sell the surplus at the markets.  Tomatoes and strawberries, mint, aubergines and peppers are popular and grow well because of their shallow roots, not in soil but in a layer of minerals laid on top of the sand.  Read more about the project here:  http://www.abitare.it/en/liveinslums/the-microjardins-in-the-city-of-the-dead/

The building in the foreground is in the Mamluk cemetery.  It’s the mausoleum of Sultan Al-Ashraf Barsbay, built in 1432 AD.

So through blogging I’ve learnt of three unusual things:  Dead City is actually a city built for the dead;  half a million people are living amongst the dead;  a few others care enough to start vegetable gardens here and improve the lives of poor cemetery dwellers.

Dead City, Cairo, 1942
Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Contrast

‘Egyptian graves’ is the caption below this photo in the album my father brought back from Cairo in 1942.  There is a contrast between grave styles:  some like theirs pyramidal and reaching up to the sky from the open desert, others prefer to stay close to the ground, in the shade of a tree.

P.S.  After submitting this photo for the ‘contrast’ challenge, I did some research about the graves in the foreground and responded to Laura’s comment below.  I learned that they are in a modern Muslim cemetery built over the site of the quarry where some of the pyramid blocks came from.  Since the time of this photo, 70 years ago, a wall has been built around the cemetery, hiding it from pyramid tourists.

I also discovered that the structure on the left of the photo is the pyramid tomb of Queen Khentkawes (c 4th Dynasty) built on top of a cube of rock which remained after blocks had been cut for the larger pyramids.

Egyptian graves, 1942