An Interview with The Discovery Channel.

About the Tomb installation piece    

In 1988, during a visit to Egypt, to visit a high school friend, I went to the Valley of Kings in Luxor for the first time. While visiting the tombs, I made the discovery that the tomb I was in seemed to be following zones of fracture concentration. It occurred to me that maybe more tombs could be found on similar fracture zones. It was not until 2002, that I was first granted permission by the Supreme Council of Antiquities to begin to study these tombs in greater detail. I took my father along with me, because he had been working with and studying these fracture trace structures since 1964. For this reason, I thought that it would be fun to work with my father on this project.

In 2006, The Supreme Council of Antiquities began to open up locked tombs for us to study. In a country where people lose their jobs if a tourist takes a picture where photography is prohibited, I personally have been granted exclusive permission to photograph every inch of a tomb. My images are slowly being stitched together. Some tombs are 10,000 piece 3d puzzles. The process is a slow meticulous one because I am trying to keep every scratch in tack and every hieroglyph in its place. My images are life sized so that they can potentially become installations in museums. They also will be put on 3d models created from base maps by Kent Weeks and The Theban Mapping Project. Each field season, I completely photograph 2 tombs, and then when I get back to the USA I start stitching these images together. This field season I completed; Rameses IX’s tomb KV-6, Merenptah’s tomb KV-8 and most of Ramses V and VL tombs KV-9.

Every time my father and I enter into the tombs, we haul in and out a lot of gear. We bring in notebooks, drawing boards, maps, triangles, compasses, a tape measure, 3 or 4 flash lights, my camera and tripod, batteries, memory cards, four two liter bottles of ice water… Sometimes the tombs are hard to get into and we have to climb in using ropes. Other times we joke and say that we are in the sauna or gym of the pharaoh whose tomb we are working in. In any case each and every time it is a workout. The temperatures range between 108 and 118 degrees. By the time we leave Egypt the tar is melting in the streets.

Among other things, the hieroglyphs on the tomb walls often comprise of “books” that explain to the dead how to get through the hours of the night to get to the next morning so that their soul is not stuck in eternal hell, but rather, they are daily making the transition from this life to the afterlife. One can find these hieroglyphs on Coffins as well as on the walls of tombs. These “books” consist of Book of the Day and Night, Book of the Dead, Book of the Gates to name a few.

This last season we walked out of Merenptah’s tomb KV-8 for the final time. We both commented individually at how we floated up the stairs of this extensive and deep tomb. We felt weightless as we ascended those stairs for the last time this field season- a period when Egypt is in political turmoil. This particular tomb goes down at approximately a 30 degree angle for eleven hallways and rooms. It is approximately 541 feet long and has at least 600 stairs in it. Our ascension was a unique uplifting feeling. As I went to our field sleeping accommodations that evening, I commented to my dad about that weightless feeling and he agreed and said that he also felt as if the gravitational pull was lifted from his boots. I couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere on one of those walls that I photographed was the verse for that weightless ascension.