Giza, 2005
Courtesy of the Gere Foundation
Photograph (c) Richard Gere
EA: Your photograph of the Pyramids and the South Pole (not shown) are like two jewels. I’ve never seen a photograph of the Pyramids from that angle before.
Richard Gere: I was in Cairo in 2005 on the way to the Middle East to meet His Holiness in Jordan, in the ancient stone-carved city of Petra. Elie Wiesel co-hosted “The Petra Conferences” with King Abdullah II of Jordan. They brought together Nobel Prize winners with distinguished social and political leaders. His Holiness was there and I was invited to come, but on the way there I was speaking at a conference of Arab women, "Women, Creativity, and Dissidence" in Cairo, Egypt, under the aegis of the Arab Women Solidarity Association (AWSA). I was there for a couple of days and I befriended one of the key archeologists.
I asked to get to the Pyramids early in the morning. I got there in the morning at dark and waited for the light to come up. We were way out in the desert. I took a lot of pictures. Somehow it was out and around, way on another side, and I could see the Pyramids were almost lining up. When the light was coming up, all the lines were converging and I just had to move maybe ten or twenty yards over, then all the lines created these planes. I’d never seen that angle in a photograph before either.
Richard Gere: I was in Cairo in 2005 on the way to the Middle East to meet His Holiness in Jordan, in the ancient stone-carved city of Petra. Elie Wiesel co-hosted “The Petra Conferences” with King Abdullah II of Jordan. They brought together Nobel Prize winners with distinguished social and political leaders. His Holiness was there and I was invited to come, but on the way there I was speaking at a conference of Arab women, "Women, Creativity, and Dissidence" in Cairo, Egypt, under the aegis of the Arab Women Solidarity Association (AWSA). I was there for a couple of days and I befriended one of the key archeologists.
I asked to get to the Pyramids early in the morning. I got there in the morning at dark and waited for the light to come up. We were way out in the desert. I took a lot of pictures. Somehow it was out and around, way on another side, and I could see the Pyramids were almost lining up. When the light was coming up, all the lines were converging and I just had to move maybe ten or twenty yards over, then all the lines created these planes. I’d never seen that angle in a photograph before either.
Richard Gere is represented by the Fahey/Klein Gallery, L.A.
Richard Gere, 108 Stupas
Erdene Zuu, Karakorum, Mongolia, 1995
Photograph (c) Elizabeth Paul Avedon
Richard Gere and Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, Bodh Gaya, India 1987
Photograph (c) Elizabeth Paul Avedon
AMERICAN PHOTO MAGAZINE
As I've lost most of the negatives from the photographs above and on the Gere Foundation site, click through for a last look before they disappear completely! – E.A.
A pilgrim is defined as a person who travels on long journeys. Richard Gere’s book of photographs, Pilgrim (published by Bulfinch Press, ISBN: 978-0821223222), is available from Amazon.com. All proceeds are donated to the Gere Foundation that supports humanitarian causes throughout the world.
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