The belief that surrounding yourself with positive people has a positive impact on you couldn’t be truer than in the case of Lina Farra.
A journey through her lens offers a ray of optimism and goodness of being human, no matter where you live. The message is conveyed in her recently published book, which will be launched in Dubai on Sunday.
Titled “000000/FFFFFF Decoding”, Lina offers scores of photographs taken during her journeys to 22 countries over a span of 12 years. Interestingly, none of the photos in the book, which took nearly six months to finalise, has a caption. Instead she wrote her own words. “I would like people to think,” she says in reply to a question on why she didn’t put a caption on any of the photos. “Either they take it at face value, where it is good photography, or they can think why she did that.”
“Does it really matter where I took them [the photos]? What matters is that they were taken in different places and you can compare and contrast,” Lina says in an interview with Weekend Review at her house in Dubai, where the interiors reflect elegance, high taste, simplicity and comfort offered by the open nature of the space.
“When I take pictures of people at Everest and of people living in South Africa, Bermuda or New York, there are similarities as well as contrasts among them, [on how] they react to life. [There are] similar moments, but they live them differently. At the end of the day, they are all looking for happiness, satisfaction, and have a smile that reflects their internal being.”
Creativity and opening the doors of imagination starts with the title of the book. The six zeros and the six Fs mean, in digital photography terms, black and white respectively, and in between the other colours fall, Lina says. “Decoding” came from the digital world we are living in, where the rapid pace of life makes us feel on-and-off most of the time.
The Lebanese-American photographer attempts to decode things and offer answers to many questions about life.
It is the first book for Lina, who has her own private business consultancy. When she was taking photos, she was not thinking of putting them together in a book. “In this way, no,” she says when asked if she was actually planning to publish a book of her photographs. “But I always had the passion. I knew I was going to publish a book, but I didn’t know when, where and what [it would be about]. And suddenly decoding came to my head and I gradually started putting it together.”
Eventually, she turned out to be not only the photographer, but also the writer and the designer for the book.
The book features several images of different places and diverse people from around the globe. The photos reflect many similarities — whether shot on the mighty Everest, at a shore in South Africa, a rural area in Egypt, or at Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
The photos appear under several themes, including Earth, animals, humans, cities, religion, life and soul. “I love to travel and I love people. I love how people live differently, how they take life, what they see in life and what makes them happy and what makes them sad. I am always curious about people,” Lina says.
Whenever she travels, she takes her camera and clicks photos of people “to connect it together, and what connects everybody is life and what is beyond life”.
“When you take a picture of something, you frame it in a way that you see it. Photography is not a snapshot. It is how you frame what is around it and what you see in it, what you want others to see in it. That is how you shoot a picture,” she adds.
Lina’s passion for photography goes back several years. When the business administration graduate from the American University of Beirut (AUB) gave birth to her son — the first of three children — some 25 years ago, her husband asked if she wanted a specific present.
“A camera,” she said. She got a Canon single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. At that time, she was not familiar with photography and was using the automatic option. She then started developing her skills. She kept all her negatives and put photos in albums. She still recalls the “dark room” where films were developed.
It was during this time that she decided to pursue her passion. She earned a degree from the Washington School of Photography in the United States where she lived for nearly 18 years before moving to Dubai in 2006.
“I studied when cameras were still analogue and we had to use the dark room to develop films. The room has a smell ... [One day] I took my three children to see the dark room because I know at one point they won’t exist. I told them this is what a dark room looks like, this is how it smells like, and this is how we wait for the stuff to dry. Then at school we were moving from analogue to digital. Digital cameras were extremely expensive and very tedious to work with.”
Lina proudly mentions that her talent developed as the industry developed. When digital cameras started becoming popular, her husband asked her if she wanted a specific gift for her birthday. “A camera,” she replied, laughing. And she got another one — this time it was from the first generation of Nikon900.
Her visits to different places, she says, have taken place under varying circumstances. She travelled to some exotic places during her global executive MBA programme at Duke Fuqua School of Business, where she joined the rest of the class on foreign trips.
Another was travelling with family to traditional destinations, including New York and Paris. Then, there were trips to countries known for yoga, such as India, since she herself practises yoga.
She also travelled with photography groups. “I went to South Africa and Cambodia [this way] ... it was beautiful. Because we have similar interests, we go to places at the right time of the day and catch the light at the right time. Compare that with people who are not interested in photography. So it was really capturing the right moment,” she says, adding: the right moment is actually a fraction of a second.
“Photography is about light. I call it painting with light. You have to decide when to go for manual shooting, how much light your picture needs, what you want in focus in that picture ... Actual photography is to look and see how much, where and what — all of this happens in a fraction of a second. You don’t have the whole day to think about it,” she says.
Speaking of some of the fascinating places she has been to, Lina says, “Each country has its own flavour, spice, light. When I was in Canada, I was fascinated by the quality of light there. Frankly speaking, Cape Town has the purest light. St Lucia in South Africa has a fascinating light and air so clean that the camera can see right through it and capture more. The picture is crisper and the scenery is out of this world. At one point, I stopped and said I don’t want to take any more pictures. You can see the shades of the clouds on the valley.”
Despite all the different places she has travelled to, Lina believes that people “are very similar. There is always love. You see pure love in the heart of people, they don’t know me and I don’t know them, but they are always smiling. They are always welcoming.”
She also met some people who found happiness even in the simplest of things. It could be a song from a small, old mobile phone.
And for those who, despite having everything, are wondering if they are happy, Lina attempts to find the answers through her photographs.
Lina Farra will sign copies of her book at Virgin Megastore, Mall of the Emirates, on November 1 between 4.30pm and 6.30pm
