Is Picfair fair?
Everyone takes photos. I’m not a professional photographer – I wouldn’t call myself a photographer of any kind – but everywhere I travel I take pictures and, sometimes, editors buy them and publish them. Most of the time, though, they don’t. That’s often for editorial reasons – my travel snaps of farflung corners of the…
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Watching the watchers
I just got back from a cruise up the Nile in Egypt. These have long been a common tourist fixture in the south, between Luxor and Aswan, but it’s been almost twenty years since cruise ships have been seen in Middle Egypt, between Cairo and Luxor. So when people on the banks caught sight of…
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Jerusalem in the snow
I had to share this – an extraordinarily evocative image of Jerusalem, from an uncaptioned, uncredited collection here (well worth viewing) that was tweeted today by @IssaEB. Have a look: It’s one of the most beautiful, poetic images of Jerusalem I think I’ve ever seen. It shows the Dome of the Rock, half-draped in snow, viewed…
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Some Riyadh visuals
Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is famous (among other things) for two skyscrapers. The best-known is the Kingdom Tower, also known as the Potato Peeler – or the Vest – for, well, obvious visual reasons. It holds offices, malls, apartments, a hotel and a fancy restaurant at the top. People like to use it…
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A thing of beauty
This is a blog about travel, but every so often it’s nice to take five minutes out for a thing of beauty. I came across the work of British-Jordanian-Palestinian photographer Tariq Dajani back in 2007, when he won First Prize in the International Color Awards for his images of Arabian horses. They blew me away….
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An old friend
The last time I saw Toufoul was in Amman in 1998 – and, to be honest, I don’t really remember her that well. Back then I was washed up after a year in Jordan, suddenly single again, and she was one of a bunch of friends I was roaming around with, trying to keep real…
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Extraordinary images
Every so often something comes along which knocks you sideways, out of your ordinary day and – even if only for a few minutes – into a place of wonder. I don’t intend this blog to be a regurgitation of stuff I happened to come across online, but today I’m making an exception. The image…