Photo of the Week: Xenia Nikolskaya

In this edition of CairoScene's Photo of the Week, Cairo-based, award-winning photographer Xenia Nikolskaya shares the image that never made the cut. While researching Dust, her landmark photobook documenting Egypt's forgotten architecture, she found herself inside the long-abandoned Tiring Building in Downtown Cairo. She knew this frame would never belong in the book, yet she pressed the shutter anyway. An image left behind in a building that, at the time, had itself been left behind. Nikolskaya calls it an "adjacent frame", a concept she inherited from her father, Soviet photographer Vladimir Nikitin.

Nikolskaya is an award-winning Russian-Swedish photographer, curator and educator. She is the former curator of the ROSFOTO Russian National Centre of Photography.

She has taught photography at the Russian Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, the American University in Cairo and Rutgers University in New Jersey, and has been teaching at the German University in Cairo since 2019. She is a Fulbright Fellow and holds a PhD from the University of Sunderland in the UK.

Her work has appeared in more than 40 international exhibitions, including 20 solo shows, and is held in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. She is the author of Dust: Egypt's Forgotten Architecture, The House My Grandfather Built (winner of the Swedish Photobook Award 2021), and Plastic Jesus.