Cairo stares back through Fares Zaitoon’s lens

In the teeming, sun-faded streets of Cairo, where exhaust smoke mingles with the scent of cardamom, jasmine, and city dust, Fares Zaitoon works in silence, his flash a sudden exclamation in a city never short on noise. Zaitoon captures the undercurrent of a metropolis forever in motion, a place both deeply familiar and permanently unsettled. His street photography is not concerned with aesthetic conventions or staged beauty; instead, it offers something far more difficult to achieve: honesty.

A self-taught visual artist born and raised in Cairo, Zaitoon began his creative journey not behind the lens, but in front of photographs, collecting them obsessively as a child before eventually turning to the act of making them himself. Since 2016, he has pursued photography with an almost monastic intensity, leaving university to immerse himself fully in the practice. His lens has explored intimate and raw themes, from addiction to emotional isolation, always tethered to a sense of proximity, whether geographic or psychological. His work has since been exhibited at the Cairographie Festival, Paris’ Hakawi showcase, and the Zamalek Art Gallery, and has appeared in publications ranging from Vice Arabia to the British Journal of Photography. Yet Zaitoon maintains an almost effortless humility, treating photography not as performance, but as quiet devotion.

“I don’t think of these works as a project,” he says, speaking on his street photography. “It’s just simple street photography. Some people play dominoes at the ahwa, and I take my photos. This is my hobby.”

But simple is not the right word. Zaitoon’s street photography pulses with Cairo’s inner tensions: the economic strain, the daily fatigue, the existential anxiety that clings to city life like summer humidity. Using a flash not to dramatise, but to punctuate, he reveals faces caught mid-thought, suspended between action and reflection. “The flash shows that I am here, and this is my position,” he explains. “I’m trying to photograph people from inside their heads—the way they’re thinking about food, work, relationships. Their faces show what they feel, and why they’re afraid.”

It’s this psychological interiority that distinguishes Zaitoon’s work. Unlike the carefully arranged portraits of more classical street photographers, his images arise from immediacy. He does not ask for permission, not out of disregard, but out of a desire to preserve the moment’s truth. “If you ask someone to pose, they change. They smile. They perform. I want to see people as they really are—lost in their thoughts, remembering someone who died, worrying about tomorrow.”

The ethical implications of this approach are not lost on him. “There’s always the question of consent,” he concedes. “But in Cairo, things are different. We live under constant surveillance. Everyone is monitored. Consent here is not like it is in other places.” This awareness infuses his work with a quiet political undertone. Subjects caught mid-stride are often mirrors of the photographer himself, both inhabiting a city that is at once generous and oppressive.

In his view, street photography is not a confrontation but a coexistence. “People are doing their work, and I am doing mine,” he says. “They help me interpret my own thoughts. For me, it’s not about knowing their names or entering their lives. We are all moving together in the same current.”

That current is turbulent. Cairo’s rhythms — its traffic, its blaring horns, its endless conversations — can either overwhelm or soothe, depending on your temperament. For Zaitoon, it does both. “Cairo is chaotic, but that chaos matches my mind. The traffic, the noise, they calm me. It’s as if my thoughts fall into line with the city’s soul.”

Zaitoon’s images, unfiltered and unsentimental, aren’t concerned with visual tidiness. Instead, they document a collective condition, that of the Cairene populace and the various psychoses that derive from the city’s wildness. In his world, photography is not a search for answers, but a form of questioning. “I don’t want to explain the city,” he says. “I want to reflect it. I want to ask, not resolve.”

Mostly taken between 2018 and 2020, his street photography began during a workshop between Cairo and Alexandria, hosted by the French Institute. Since then, his trajectory has taken him to Europe, earning him scholarships in Denmark and Germany, and was recently awarded the Prince Claus Fund’s FELLOWS Award. Yet Cairo remains his greatest subject, and his deepest mystery.

Zaitoon does not attempt to romanticise his city, nor does he seek to condemn it. What he offers, instead, is a mirror (of himself and of humanity), not perfectly polished, but textured, uncertain, and real. Through his flash-lit frames, we glimpse the city not as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing consciousness. And in that glimpse, we recognise something of ourselves.