EL TOR 1975 Part 1 introduction

Adventures in the desert.
I was trying to get to Saint Catherine’s Monastery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery high in the mountains of the Sinai desert but during the winter, a minefield had been washed down onto the road and I had to make a detour.

The road to Abu Rudeis was long, hot and dusty and I was told the next bus up the mountain was on a Tuesday. It was Wednesday. Sadly I retraced my steps back a hundred kilometres, getting lifts from army trucks and at one point a half-track until eventually I was stranded in the heat on an empty road with only an oil barrel for company.

I only had a tourist map but a few miles to the north was the encouraging icon of a sun lounger and parasol over the seaside town of El Tor. I was dehydrated and hallucinating slightly when I was awoken by the hooting horn of a pickup full of Bedouins. I jumped in the back and they took me to El Tor.

At this time the Sinai Peninsular was occupied by Israel following the Six-Day War in 1967 (as a result of the Israel–Egypt Peace Treaty of 1979, Israel withdrew from the peninsula and it was returned to Egypt). In 1975 the desert was full of the detritus of war.

I was shocked when I saw El Tor. I naively thought it might have a shop or a beach front or somewhere to stay.

It was a ghost town, long-deserted and destroyed, situated on a bleak salty coastal plain gently sloping from the jagged red mountains down to the Gulf of Suez. There were a few Bedouin, a small oil exploration team and a naval lookout further up the coast. I would have felt scared if I had not been totally overwhelmed by the strangeness and emptiness and horror of the place.

I chose a wrecked dhow to sleep in, the beach was littered with them, and I fixed up a gangplank that I could pull up at night. I started to explore the town cautiously, each day covering more streets in the heat. There was a huge deserted hospital that had been a decontamination centre for pilgrims travelling on the Haj to Mecca, everything was smashed and lying about in disarray.

It was very lonely and sometimes dangerous. The desert wind constantly had doors and windows banging and there was always some human like shape in the distance that on closer inspection turned out to be a flapping tarpaulin. I walked through a minefield, only alerted to it by seeing the warning sign from the wrong side. I could see what looked like a crashed helicopter on a sand bar far in the distance, after walking for hours it turned out to be a fisherman’s hut and a long plank.

Walking along the main town centre street, attacked by eagles and crows, I noticed rolls of film in the sand and that was how I found the photographer’s shop.

EL TOR The unknown photographer.
I was picking through the negatives in the sand and I realised that these old scratchy scenes and portraits had an artistic value and juxtaposed with my own views of the town might make a poignant portrait of the horror of war.

I bought some of the negatives from a Bedouin but I do not know if he had the right to sell them. The pictures this photographer took are very good. As far as I can tell they were taken sometime between 1956 and 1967.

EL TOR Disclosure
I have used the unknown photographer’s images alongside my own photographs for artistic and documentary effect only. They form an intrinsic part of the art-work. I do not own the copyright of these images it belongs to the unknown photographer and I make it clear they are not my own work.

I do not wish to profit from the photographer’s work. I do not know who the photographer was.

The project is split into Part 1 (introduction)

https://montyrakusen.tumblr.com/post/621813732677500928/el-tor-1975-part-1-introduction-adventures-in-the

Part 2 https://montyrakusen.tumblr.com/post/621749159752548352/el-tor-sinai-1975-part-2

Part 3 https://montyrakusen.tumblr.com/post/621748895945457664/el-tor-sinai-1975-part-3

Part 4 https://montyrakusen.tumblr.com/post/621748676696604672/el-tor-sinai-1975-part-4

Text edit by: John Coombes