Mr. President’s Circus by John Perkins

When I started making these pictures, I thought I was photographing a circus. It was only after the first year I found that the circus is not just a circus, it's also a government department. And government departments in Egypt work somewhat differently than government departments in Europe, where I grew up. So I sort of forgot about midgets and other things photographers love to photograph and got excited about old posters, used tickets, paperwork and family trees. Almost everyone at the circus is related. And it goes back generations. And in getting into these things, I got to wonder about how Egypt came to be the way it is. And this is a really complicated thing to talk about. So I won't. But maybe the photographs will give an idea of some of the questions I had in my head.