Dubai: You don’t have to travel the world to see some of the world’s photographic masterpieces, as Dubai has brought them to you, organisers of the Dubai Photo Exhibition said.
The Dubai Photo Exhibition opened on Wednesday with 868 museum-quality photographs from the 20th and 21st century by 129 photographers from 23 countries. The photographs range from the earliest photographic experiments, including one of the oldest selfies or self-portraits, to modern classics and innovative contemporary artworks.
The Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid International Photography Award (HIPA) organised the event with the support of the World Photography Organisation. The exhibition is part of the weeklong celebration of all things photographic for the Dubai Photography Season to make Dubai a leading photography hub.
“This exhibition is a lifetime achievement. The kinds of works exhibited here are [unprecedented]. You have to travel to France to see it; you have to travel to the UK to see it. So rather than buy a ticket and fly to France or elsewhere, we brought the exhibition to you here,” Ali Bin Thalith, HIPA Secretary-General, said.
“This is a very nice chance to see some of the remarkable works in photography around the world here in Dubai and how photography has progressed, how it has changed through the years.”
The oldest photograph in the exhibition, The Drowned Man, is one of the oldest selfies that was shot in 1840 by Hippolyte Bayard. The world’s first selfie is believed to have been taken the year before that by an American photographer Robert Cornelius.
The exhibition also includes unseen photos of the UAE in the 1950s through to the 1970s from the private collection of Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council.
Renowned Arab photographer Oscar Mitri’s photos take the audience into a UAE that’s completely different from the modern metropolis that it is now. They recount the simple desert life to the photo of Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan with the British High Commissioner signing an agreement to pull out the British army from the Trucial States in 1971, among others.
But apart from photography as a medium, the exhibition also celebrates the story behind the photos. One of these is Yan Wang Preston’s Mother River Photo project taken in four years across the 6,211-km Yangtze river in China.
Preston divided the river into 62 points with an equal distance of 100km and travelled off-road in extreme weather conditions to take one photo at each point using a film camera, the Linhof camera. The idea was to show how the Mother River has changed.
“I had to sleep in the car sometimes because it’s uninhabited, we had nowhere to stay. Because it’s on the Tibetan Plateau, this spot is 4,000 metres above sea level, it has only half the oxygen we have at sea level and it is -30 degrees Celsius. There were no roads; you have to drive across rivers without bridges,” Preston told Gulf News, adding it was all worth it. “In the very fast-changing world, this is my way to observe the river from a new perspective.”
SOME INTERESTING FINDS:
1) The Drowned Man — one of the world’s oldest selfies by Hippolyte Bayard taken in 1840.
2) A picture of the Yangtze River by Chang He that was recreated from 3,000 photographs
3) Claudia Jaguaribe’s book photography on Sao Paulo’s cityscape on a 20-metre-long paper
4) Cassio Vasconcellos’ Aeroporto composed of more than 1.000 images of more than 100 airports worldwide taken in six months and pooled together through Photoshop for one year in a style called constructed or pool photography.
5) French photographer Antoine d’Agata’s 99 self-portraits taken in 2015. The selfies are reflections on an old and damaged mirror.
What: Dubai Photo Exhibition
When: March 16 to 19
Timing: March 16 (5.30pm — 9pm)
March 17 (10am — 9pm)
Student Group Bookings: 10am — 1pm
Ladies Only: 2pm — 5pm
March 18 (10am — 9pm)
Photography Fun: 10am — 10pm
March 19 (10am — 7pm)
Photography Fun: 10am — 8pm
