What the Stones Remember

What the Stones Remember is a long-term photographic survey of the disappearing artisans, laborers, and inherited crafts of the Hejaz — the perfumer, the weaver, the fisherman, the shepherd, the poet — and the coral-stone vernacular architecture that once housed them. It begins in the historic Al-Balad district of Jeddah.

The work draws on the classical Arabic tradition of the waqfa ‘ala al-atlal, the pause at the ruins, through which the pre-Islamic Mu’allaqat poets measured what time takes and what it leaves. Figures appear from behind or absorbed in the work of their hands. Three movements structure the body of work: what has been — the architecture and the inherited object; what is being — the labor still happening; and what will be — the restored space and the question of who will occupy it.

An elder trader in Al-Balad, old enough to remember the tail end of the Ottoman order, told me that every city has a soul, and Jeddah’s soul is fish and trade — and that poets, farmers, fishermen, and shepherds are art too. That widened the project to include every form of inherited labor, not only the crafts.