In this beautiful art book, award-winning American photographer Ann Parker records and celebrates life as it passes along a road through a typical village in the Egyptian Nile Delta in the early twenty-first century. But her photographs are not mere documents of a specific time and place; they transcend both as she captures timeless moments in an eternal world and presents us with a potentially infinite and hauntingly memorable pageant of living tableaux, silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. Like spectators seated in a theater, we watch the comings and goings of the village’s people, animals, and vehicles on the road in front of us. Introducing the photographs are extracts from the autobiographical reflections of the poet Muhammad Afifi Matar, who was born and grew up in a small Delta village very like the one pictured by Ann Parker. His recollections of a rural Egyptian childhood and adolescence are sometimes warming, sometimes chilling, but always insightful and thought-provoking.

Ann Parker has produced over 50 one-woman exhibitions around the world. Her photographs can be found in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Muhammad Afifi Matar was born in the Nile Delta village of Ramlat al-Anjab in 1935. Widely recognized as one of Egypt’s leading poets, he was awarded the prestigious Oweiss Prize in 1999.