A Friendly Face in a Faraway Place

A Friendly Face in a Faraway Place

In July 1991, Monitor photographer Robert Harbison was in Moqattam, a suburb of Cairo, finishing an assignment. He passed a man - who was sitting on the stoop of a small store with friends - and then agreed to take the man's picture. "Were it not for the cars and a few commercial signs," Harbison recalls, "one could easily be transported back a few thousand years. After I had made a few frames, he symbolically reached across the ages, shook my hand, and we parted."