Public Image Project @ Cairo

Street art in Maadi, Cairo.
One of my images.
Can you share a better one?

Join PIP @ Cairo!

This post is not related to books, but to artistic creation in the wider sense. To be precise: photography, and how to share it.

I was looking for decent images of Cairo to use in my work. Though there are plenty of images from Cairo --and many of them better than anything I'll ever produce-- very few are marked for reuse with a Creative Commons license.

Whereas in Egypt nobody worries about copyright, users in Europe and the US generally do, so the absence of publicly-licensed content is a problem. It means that the images that private individuals, such as students, scholars, bloggers, etc... can use safely are few in number, and limited to a few commonly-photographed motifs.

So ... I went ahead and created a Flickr group to share my own images, to set a precedent, and to encourage others to do the same. In fact, some of the pictures are my son's, but he has kindly granted me permission to use them on the group. Generosity runs in families, you see!

If you have some decent images of Cairo on Flickr, please contribute. If not, consider signing up for Flickr, and contribute. With a little effort, we can show the world that there is more to Cairo than Tahrir square.