Mahmoud Khattab’s new photobook explores the stillness between military shifts

Some books arrive quietly but leave a lasting resonance. Mahmoud Khattab’s The Dog Sat Where We Parted is such a work, an unflinching yet poetic meditation on solitude, masculinity, and the inner landscape of military service in Egypt, where every able-bodied male with brothers is obliged to serve in the country’s military apparatus. Self-published outside of Egypt to avoid censorship, the book is as much an object of resistance as it is a personal reckoning. It unfolds with quiet urgency, told through photographs and sparse, aching prose—both drawn from Khattab’s time as a conscripted army doctor in the Egyptian desert.

At its heart is Antar, a stray dog, a guardian, and a symbolic anchor for the narrative. “We had a symbiotic relationship,” Khattab recalls. “He ate most of my rations, and in return, he would alert me during guarding shifts.” Their parting—Antar refusing to follow Khattab after a farewell with another soldier—becomes the book’s title and emotional fulcrum. It is a moment suspended in memory, rendered with a sense of haunting finality.

Khattab’s photographs resist the familiar visual language of military imagery. There is no posturing here, no spectacle of discipline. Instead, he offers us silence. Fragility. Dust-laced stillness. “Photography became a way to echo my solitude,” he explains. “On vast plains of desert, through images and journal entries, I held on to fragments of self.”

The result is a work that is both deeply personal and politically charged—though Khattab is careful about how that charge is articulated. In a country where over 60,000 political prisoners languish under a tightening regime, discretion is not a matter of modesty, but survival. “Yes, it’s an artist book,” he says, “but it’s important for my safety that political commentary be approached with care.”

Still, The Dog Sat Where We Parted is undeniably political—if not through direct confrontation, then in its insistence on preserving the individual within a system built to erase him. In Egypt, military conscription is compulsory and far-reaching; young men cannot travel or work legally without fulfilling it. Khattab’s images—of shadowed watch towers, blurred desert vistas, and bodies in moments of pause—trace the contours of this enforced waiting. “One aspect I worked on,” he notes, “was conveying the solitude of a soldier. Most of our time is spent in long hours of guarding shifts, where nothing happens—where your mind is left to wander, to survive.”

The intimacy of the book is accentuated by its physical form. Cloth-bound in linen, modest in scale, it reads like a held breath. “Books are not exhibitions,” Khattab says. “They are momentary, intimate interactions.” The design, refined over two years, mirrors the gestures of a soldier passing time—slowly, reflectively, page by page.

Throughout the work, Khattab’s voice remains tender, even as it recounts hardship. His journal entries—written alongside the images—move between vulnerability and restraint. “It started with a poem,” he says, “just two months into service. It felt like a weight lifted. From then, writing and photographing became simultaneous acts of survival.”

It is perhaps this blend of lyricism and restraint that has drawn attention well beyond Cairo or Paris. The book was shortlisted for the Luma Dummy Book Award, and in 2025, became the winner of the Kraszna Krausz Photography Book Award. “It’s a vindication,” Khattab reflects, “that stories told from conviction can travel far—especially ours, which have long been overlooked by those who preferred our resources to our voices.

And yet, recognition does not blunt the memory. Asked what remains with him now, years after those desert walks, Khattab replies simply: “A deep calm that stayed with me from gazing too long into the desert. And a gratitude for the warm bonds that grew over time.”

In a moment when noise is often mistaken for meaning, The Dog Sat Where We Parted makes a quiet, necessary argument for slowness—for listening to what emerges in the pause between duties, in the space between what is said and what is endured, and the pangs of melancholy that when alchemised correctly perhaps transform boredom and mundanity into a realisation of a grander humanity.

The Dog Sat Where We Parted is currently available internationally through Khattab’s website.