Madame Ikhlas Helmy was born and raised on a houseboat in Cairo, and now lives in one of the last still moored in the Kit Kat district — once home to royal nightclubs and floating salons.This gallery captures the atmosphere of a vanishing world: the golden age of the awamat, the elegance of the dahabiehs, and the quiet resilience of those who never left the water.
The photographs were taken in November 2011, as the city pulsed with political tension in the wake of revolution.
On the river, life moved at a different pace. Velvet chairs, worn wood, filtered light — fragments of a disappearing world, held together by memory and devotion.
A visual trace of a life afloat: intimate, fragile, and quietly defiant.
