The Sultan-Cairo Suite

About the Photographer

Weeks, Eric

American, b.1965

Eric Weeks' photograph Still Life with Mouse (Requiem), from the series Observations from Beneath My Bed, was taken in the artist's apartment. Having witnessed the trap’s brutal operation, Weeks brought the mouse into the kitchen and photographed it on his stove. The gas flame in the background of the photograph serves as a memorial for the rodent, turning a banal event into a moment that is expressive of more universal themes.

In March of 1995, while on a month-long residency at the American University of Cairo, Weeks completed the Cairo Suite. In this set of photographs, the artist engages his surroundings in Egypt, while also exploring the relationship between fact and fiction in photography. In addition to making images that allude to traditional Judeo-Christian stories, Renaissance and Orientalist painting, and literary works such as A Thousand and One Nights, Weeks also photographed events that arose unexpectedly. He took the image Sultan (1995) on a trip into the western desert, during which the group's jeep broke down. Seeing the man named Sultan crouched beneath a tree making tea, Weeks recalls, "I responded to his regal bearing and felt that this man, engrossed in this simple, primal task, represented the millions of others who had done it before him out in the desert."

Eric Weeks was born in Summit, New Jersey on June 16, 1965. He received a BFA from School of Visual Arts, New York (1987) and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (1994). He has worked for the publications Newsweek, Discover, and Fortune, and taught at School of Visual Arts in New York.