I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about ruin, war photography and
walking, and the way in which the walker so often becomes a compositional
element in an image. Well, it won’t be
stopping any time soon.
Last week, supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi attacked dozens
of Christian churches in Egypt, justified on the basis that Christians have in
general supported the military takeover.
Last Thursday the Evangelical Church of Mallawi (Mallawi being an Egyptian
town, south of Cairo), was ransacked looted and burned.
These pictures by Roger Anis show the ruins and the people walking
there, and they strike me as wonderful: informative, moving, infinitely
depressing. But even as we resist the aestheticization
of ruin, we also know that if the photographs didn’t contain walkers, they
wouldn’t be nearly so effective.
This brings me, in a bathetic sort of way to the cover of the next
Nicholson book, titled, perhaps unsurprisingly, Walking In Ruins.
There’ll be far more plugging nearer the time of publication: October. I didn’t have a whole lot of input on the
cover design but the one thing I was absolutely certain of, I didn’t want the
image to show a picture of someone walking in ruins. I didn’t even discuss it with the designer;
he simply got it.
