Postcards from the past

 

The most significant challenge in releasing a compilation of tracks from the Bourini Records label turned out to be coming up with appropriate images. The artists were mostly long forgotten singers with little to no information about them other than their Bourini release data on Discogs. 

The most famous artist, the blind Egyptian Bedouin singer Abu Bakr Abdel Aziz (aka Abu Abab), had passed away in 1991 and the sole photo of him online had all of the lush detail of the infamous avatar used by Twitter favorite wint (@dril).

It wasn't until I started googling variations of "Egyptian singers 1960s" "bedouin musicians" etc. that I got hits from a well-known stock photography agency. Some back and forth with Hisham and designer Grant Corum ensued, during which we discovered that not only did several different agencies claim ownership of the image in question, but that each attributed it to a different uploader. 

Clearly, a number of different people were uploading their antique photo and postcard collections, claiming ownership in the hope of making a bit of passive income.

We turned to eBay hoping to find the original; miraculously, we did -- along with about a dozen other postcards and photos, most of them well over 100 years old.

While clearly not photos of the artists included on the compilation, these images featured their performer-ancestors, as most of these photos were taken in lower Egypt, from the Suez Canal to the Western Desert near the Libyan border.