It Started simply enough with a Karim Stores photographer, Boulos Isaac, answering amateur photographers’ questions on the company’s Facebook page, writes Sherif Sonbol. Isaac is such a gifted teacher he actually prefers teaching photography to practising it, so much so that while a secondary student at the Dhaher College de la salle, he grasped the question of f-stops so well his physics teacher let him teach the class, paying him LE30 per lesson.

When some of them expressed the need for on-hand guidance Boulus took them out to Al Azhar Park for a day, 3-11 pm, where they tried out various techniques in changing light conditions. That was back in 2013, and the experience was so successful Isaac quickly founded “Let’s Learn the Art of Photography”, which quickly became the most popular Arabic photography Facebook group. Bringing together all kinds of people from all walks of life, it is now administered by Ahmed Al-Regaili as well as Isaac, and boast over 118 thousand subscribers.

This year the group’s annual exhibition opened on 1 October at Al Sawi Culture Wheel. 388 photographers from all across the Arabic-speaking world contribute work ranging from water drop photography (Mustafa Labib) to images of Kurdistan (Saman Abdel-Baqi), and from a macro image of a jumping spider (Amgad Galal) to a powerful image of Al-Gamaliya in Islamic Cairo by a 15-year old (Nader Boulus).

*A version of this article appears in print in the 15 October, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly