Mule strike

With the threat of a fuel strike still hanging over British motorists, replacing fuel lorries with donkeys is probably not one of the interim solutions being proposed.

But this photograph released by Oxford University’s Griffith Institute seems to show one way in which fuel was transported around Egypt in the 1970s.

The intriguing snap was taken by American photographer John Ross, who became a freelance photographer after meeting professional photographers while flying to Cairo as a navigator for TWA airlines.

Mrs Cat Warsi of the Griffith Institute said: ‘We don’t know about this photograph – is that tank really full of oil? Were poor donkeys regularly used to carry fuel? But we do know that John Ross photographed for Vogue and Magnum and at Carnegie Hall, while his photographs of Egypt, its culture and people, have appeared in many hundreds of books, and we are delighted to have so many of these important images in our archive.’

This image is one of more than 2,000 colour images shot by American photographer John Ross between the 1960s and the 1990s. The images were donated to the Griffith Institute by his former wife Mrs Judy Ross after his death in 2006. The Ross archive also includes 500 black and white colour negatives, 300 prints and six volumes of antique postcards.

More photographs can be viewed on the Griffith Institute’s website and new Facebook page. But don’t expect to see this particular image in a Shell advert any time soon.

Top image: Picture by John Ross, courtesy of Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. Bottom image: A petrol station in Coventry during protests over fuel prices in 2008 (image by Mike1024)