Hurghada, Egypt
By Brittney Bush Bollay
No more than a fishing village fifteen years ago, Hurghada, located on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, is now a city of forty thousand, whose big bang growth is attributable to just one thing: tourism. The rapidity of growth and singularity of purpose have left the town somewhat devoid of real interest: it often seems like nothing more than a candy-coated shell with a money-making machine inside. Being exposed to its machinations for an extended period of time can be quite wearisome; a person can offer only so many polite refusals to pitches for camel rides or water pipe sales.
Photo by: Brittney BushIt was in Hurghada that I began taking photography seriously. At first it was a means to escape the nuisances around me. A simple walk down the street was a gauntlet of honking taxi drivers, sleazy date-seekers and insistent souvenir vendors. Just wanting my peace, I looked away. And when I looked I saw that the quiet things in Hurghada – the gates and gardens and houses – are filled with beauty. So one day I took my camera, and I began to document, combing my surroundings for their visual riches. Just off of the "main drag" I found back alleys and quiet, shaded lanes, rich in character, full of surprises.
Photo by: Brittney Bush
The colorful edifices of Hurghada's many apartment buildings became one of my greatest photographic loves. Egyptians love to fill their homes and their towns with color, an antidote to the bland beige of the desert that surrounds them. During my explorations, I found blue shutters, orange doorways with white stripes, purple balconies, yellow walls, and sherbet-pink frontages with white plaster trim. Sometimes I felt as if I was living in a marzipan town.
Photo by: Brittney BushLiving subjects presented themselves, too. Stray animals are everywhere in Hurghada, picking through trash cans, sleeping in sand piles, sniffing hopefully at your grocery bag as you walk home. The cats are often timid or even unfriendly, but many dogs are quite congenial and seem to be neighborhood fixtures, wandering from person to person for a friendly word or a scratch behind the ears, and some of them became my walking companions. They're usually more than eager to be photographed, too – in fact, it's a trick to get the shot taken and the camera away before you find a canine nose-print on your lens.
Photo by: Brittney BushIn the six months since I started documenting Hurghada, a full scale passion for photography has taken hold of me, and my subject matter has expanded. No matter how many directions I point my lens, however, I've always found the city calling me at least once a week. The money machine still ticks away behind the scenes and I still get followed down the street by salesmen with armfuls of fake “papyrus” but I've come to love the beauty of the sugary shell. And as I lift my camera towards an alluring scene, the taxi horn behind me becomes magically silent, the rest of the world disappears, and Hurghada and I are, for a moment, at peace.
