I’ve just stumbled across Cee’s challenge to find black and white photos of cars. I have just the thing, though I didn’t take the photos. My father did, way back when these cars were his. They were taken long before I was born, in a spot near the beach, probably Noosa Heads (long before they solved the sandfly problem and turned it into an internationally appealing resort town). The first photo is of the family car; I have other photos of it with my sister and brother as toddlers sitting on the running board (that’s how wide it is!).
My father’s car, c1943
The next photo is of Dad’s ute (short for utility truck). My mother told me he made the tray on the back to put his tins of paint and work gear in.
Sometimes at the centre of a novel a new character is introduced who changes everything. In John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, it’s not until the middle that we meet the title character. And it’s then that everything changes for the German boy, Bruno:
“The boy was smaller than Bruno and was sitting on the ground with a forlorn expression. He wore the same striped pyjamas that all the other people on that side of the fence wore, and a striped cloth cap on his head. He wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks and his feet were rather dirty. On his arm he wore an armband with a star on it.”
Feluccas are traditional motorless boats that have been used for transport on the Nile River since biblical times. From the photo below you’d have to agree that they are graceful whether their masts are tilted into the wind or tilted at rest on the beach. The design is simple, a small wooden boat with a few cushioned seats around the sides, a table in the middle, and sails made from cotton or other natural fibres.
Today feluccas carry tourists and locals on peaceful pleasure boat trips along the Nile. This photo is from my father’s World War two album and was taken in 1941 or 1942. Aren’t the large creamy triangular sails ideal in black and white photography!
Felucca, Egypt, c1941
Ailsa came up with this theme for a photo challenge. Check out an amazing tilted tree and other photos here.
Now she’s challenging us to show off our own curves. Here are mine:
La Basilique Notre Dame d’Héliopolis, or the Basilique Church, sits in the centre of Heliopolis, which at the beginning of the 20th century was a planned town built in the desert ten kilometres from the centre of Cairo by the Belgian Baron Empain. It’s now a suburb of Cairo. Alexandre Marcel, the church’s architect, was inspired by Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, designing a smaller version of the domed basilica to be the centre of the new town. The baron is buried beneath the church.
This photo from my father’s album of 1941 is captioned by him “Electric trains”. I initially believed this building was the old Palace Hotel in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, but today I contacted someone in Heliopolis about my photos and he has corrected me.
This building is in the same area as the Palace Hotel which is now one of the presidential palaces, but the photo shows the el-Korba (the curve) district of Heliopolis which was once occupied by aristocratic Egyptians and some Europeans. The architecture of the area was commissioned by the Belgian Baron Empain in the early 1900s; the building in the photo was built in 1907. The architecture is unique, consisting of European-style arcaded balconies and broad colonnaded sidewalks combined with Islamic (Moorish-Persian) domes and geometric and arabesque patterns. The area was neglected at the end of the twentieth century as a reaction against old colonial influences, but after Heliopolis celebrated its centenary in 2005 the locals began to plan for the preservation of the architecture as part of Cairo’s heritage. Since 2005 a festival has been held annually to celebrate the Korba district and its uniqueness. In January this year a group of volunteers established the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative (HHI) with a vision to revive the area’s architecture and culture and to reduce the gridlocked traffic, which was clearly, looking at this photo, not a problem in 1941.
