In 2017, Mahmoud Khattab served a year of Egypt’s national service as an army doctor. The photographs he made during that time were taken discreetly, and they are paired here with journal writing that records solitude: following orders, sharing meals and stories with strangers, and his companionship with a dog in the desert. The book’s title refers to Antar, a stray with whom Khattab formed a bond during five-mile desert walks. First published in 2024 in an edition of 700 copies, the book carries photographs, text, illustration, and graphic design all attributed to Khattab, and it was printed at the Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire Printing House.
The result is not a conventional account of military life. Its subject is vulnerability and introspection, and its approach — photographs made quietly, alongside writing that behaves like a journal — lets the year accumulate through ordinary, repeated detail rather than through spectacle. The book measures 112 pages in A5, bound as a linen hardcover with letterpress work, on cotton 120g paper with linen sourced from a local market. Design and sequencing are Khattab’s own, so the pacing of image and text belongs to the same hand that made the pictures.
The book won the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. It also appeared on the 2025 PhotoBook Awards shortlist, where it was described as weaving photographs and poetic journal-like entries. Two earlier distinctions — the 2023 Polycopies prize and a place on the 2024 LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award shortlist — belong to the project’s development and predate the published edition.
For a collector, the interest lies in that continuity: a self-published first edition in which one person made the photographs, wrote the text, and designed the object, and in which a year of service is rendered at close range and without heroics. The locally sourced linen and the author’s responsibility for both words and images make the edition particularly relevant to a collection exploring the relationship between personal testimony and the making of an artist’s book.
