Anba Hatre

Aswan, Egypt, Dec 2005: Anba Hatre is an earlier name of the 7th century Coptic Christian monastery of St Simeon- featured here in my previous post. During the exploration I shot some video on a very basic mini-DV camcorder, and due to this being my last tape I edited it all in camera to make […]

The Monastery

Aswan, Egypt, Dec 2005: After exploring some ancient tombs on the westbank of the Nile (featured here)- we decided to walk across the open desert to the ruined 7th century monastery of St. Simeon. It didn’t look far, but in the heat and harsh enviroment of the desert, it proved to be a bit more […]

Airbridge

Decrypt

Egypt, Dec 2005: Inspecting some ancient tombs on the westbank of the Nile- across from Aswan. They were completely off the tourist trail and not mentioned in any guidebooks. We eventually found a man who had keys to them and he let us in for a look- after a certain amount of “baksheesh” was paid. […]

Pyro

Pyromania is an impulse control disorder in which an individual repeatedly and deliberately starts fires- in order to relieve tension, for gratification or for relief. The term pyromania comes from the Greek word πῦρ (‘pyr’, fire). This was just one of a dozen buildings torched by a pyromaniac over a single weekend two years ago. […]

The Centre

New Zealand, Dec 2011: At the close of the Second World War, this former Air Force base was converted into a “Mental Deficiency Colony” to house children deemed ‘backward’. By the mid 1970’s it had become the largest psychopaedic hospital in the southern hemisphere, with a population exceeding 700. The centre was “deinstitutionalisation” in 2005 […]

Tokaora

Taranaki, NZ, September 2012: Unlike all the other abandoned schools I’ve photographed, this one has a happy ending… Tokaora school- which has been empty for at least a decade- now has new pupils. A nearby school had to move premises, so have given this little country school a new lease of life…

Departures

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at […]

The Hejaz Railway – part 1

Syria, November 2005: When I learnt that the Hejaz Railway was actually still operational, I knew I had to ride it. I’d always admired David Lean’s classic 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia”-and to actually ride the rails that T.E.Lawrence and his band of Arab rebels had so successfully attacked and destroyed- well it just had to […]