Narrow streets, plants and numberless stones; walls that hide layers upon layers in their shadows. Amid all this a tree struggles, climbing the wall of death laid there, as if life itself refused to surrender. The city appears as a dark, cold womb in which life nonetheless thrives. Photographed in the City of the Dead in Cairo between 1979 and 2008, Bernard Guillot's pictures do not narrate the stories of the people who live there; they record the effect of time on the city and rebuild it as his own — sparse in people, where the stones seem to be the living creatures, breathing under the sun.