Khalid Abdelrahman painted Khartoum for years, its neighbourhoods and houses and trees, a whole middle-class world rendered in saturated colour, until the war of 2023 took the city and the studio where that work was made. I found him in Maadi, in a Cairo apartment he shares with his wife and three children, where there is no studio anymore, only a living room, a kitchen counter lined with tubes of paint beside a glass of tea, an easel set between the furniture, and on every wall the Khartoum he fled, still being painted from memory. I am Egyptian and Sudanese myself and have never seen Sudan, so photographing him was a way of standing close to a place I know only through people like him. I kept it plain: a man against a bare wall whose face carries the weight without saying it, the improvised backdrop and light-stand left in the frame because pretending this was a real studio would be a lie, and then the room itself, the colour of home blazing against borrowed walls. It ends at the kitchen table, beneath one of his paintings, his young son beside him, because the city survives on the wall and he is not painting only for himself
