While most people might never get to travel through some of the world’s most sacred and holy lands, traversing these spaces through the lens of an expert is the ultimate journey. Award-winning photographer Chester Higgins has created not only a work of art but many portable moments of quiet in the images he has captured in his decades-long sojourns to the Nile Valley region of the African continent. There is something aesthetically beautiful and awe-inspiring when faced with a page covered entirely by an Oda, the “sacred sycamore” tree where Oromo people came to sit in a circle around it, facing the river; paying homage to their supreme divinity who had blessed them with three months of rain.

Chester Higgins Jr.’s new book Sacred Nile explores the timeless role of faith as it connects past and present. In the mid-1950s, Chester Higgins Jr., then nine years old, remembers being awakened by a faint frequency vibrating inside his head while asleep in his childhood home in New Brockton, Alabama. It was sometime around three in the morning when he opened his eyes, only to see a circular white light on the wall opening like the aperture of a pupil. In the light, an African man dressed in traditional robes appeared, his eyes closed and hand raised in peace.

“Being in Africa, I’ve discovered, is quite a relief for me because… [when I go, I’m] in the majority. I don’t have to worry about people looking at my color and [I’m] a target, people not knowing me and they hate me. I’ve found that the whole stress of racism just lifts off your shoulder.” Higgins often refers to Africans as “my cousins.” He’s been to Egypt 20 times, most recently to shoot photos of tombs. His latest book, The Sacred Nile, presents images of pyramids, rock-hewn churches, tombs and other religious monuments along the River Nile. Higgins says his trips to the continent have become his life-long assignment.

In The Sacred Nile, acclaimed photojournalist Chester Higgins, Jr. intertwines powerful photography with spirituality in a journey depicting African peoples who have lived along the banks of the African river since antiquity. The book, with texts from writer Betty Kissam, was 50 years in the making. “I have made some 20 trips to Egypt, 18 trips to Ethiopia and 4 trips to Sudan made yearly during two to six weeks field trips,” Higgins, a longtime Fort Greene resident, told Our Time Press.

Soaring atop the stack, and rightfully so, was “Sacred Nile” (BCH Fulfilment & Distribution, 2021) by noted photographer/historian Chester Higgins with text by Betsy Kissam. The book is a fabulous collection of Higgins’ photos and on every page it’s perfectly accompanied by Kissam’s informative text. From the opening photo and caption, Kemet (Egypt) where King Ramses is depicted kneeling to be anointed by the Holy Father to the book’s end with a beautiful shot of Tis Esat, the Blue Nile Falls, Higgins and Kissam invite and then enthrall readers with the wondrous history that has blossomed along the fertile river.

Sometimes photographs are mementos of the journey. Other times, the images themselves take you places. Over the past 50 years — from his student days at Tuskegee University in the late ‘60s to his nearly four-decade-long staff photographer position at The New York Times — Higgins has used his camera to document, convey, emphasize, and unearth honest renditions of humanity.

For more than five decades, Higgins has made several journeys to and taken photographs of Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan. These photographs of nature, of people (singular portraits and groups), of man-made wonders such as pyramids, obelisks, statues, paintings, glyphs and so much more, are wonderful works of art that can be appreciated with a quick glimpse as well as a deliberate, lengthy study.

All along the way, his eye is trained on moments of calm, locating an inherent grace, style, and sublime beauty in the Black everyday.

With his camera, Chester wrestles with issues of memory, place and identity, he sees his life as a narrative and his photography as its expression. His art gives visual voice to his personal and collective memories.

In 1973 Chester Higgins traveled to Egypt for the first time. Embarking on what would become nearly a half century of visual, intellectual, experiential, and spiritual revelations, he is now poised to share his findings with the world.

Ethiopians speak of “children of the river”—yewenz lejoch in Amharic, the country’s official language. This phrase characterises people living near and relying on the water of a river for travel and nourishment, whether for their own needs or for the crops and livestock they depend on.