Dubai: Over its thirty years of operation, Gulf News has accumulated what is perhaps the most unique and extensive record of the UAE's modern history in photographs.
Check out:
Story of the UAE in pictures - Part I
Story of the UAE in pictures - Part II
Story of the UAE in pictures - Part III
Story of the UAE in pictures - Part IV
To celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, Gulf News made some of the most priceless of these pictures available to the public through a 400 page book marking the milestones of the nation's progress.
The Rise of a Nation contains 1,600 pictures that illustrate the phases and transitions the country has gone through. It is the product of tireless digitisation and archiving of images, and has been picked from a treasure of the 900,000 pictures that Gulf News has.
Gulf News editor at large Francis Mathew and hub editor Najla Al Rostamani edited the book, which involved short-listing some 15,000 pictures in the first round, and choosing the best 1,600 of them.
"The UAE is very poorly archived and there are no rivals to Gulf News' archives," said Matthew. "There are no archives publicly available. The documentation centres, libraries and museums have valuable collections but they don't match our depth of daily reporting."
In tracking the developments of the UAE, the book also serves as a testament to the progress the paper has made. It demonstrates the newspaper's dedication in being present at historical events and recording them to preserve the nation's unique history in pictures.
"Gulf News, along with the UAE, has grown and you can see that in the pictures. With that unique archive of pictures we decided to chart the history of our 30 years in photographs," said Mathew.
"You can see young men getting experience and then older and wiser men leading. You can see crown princes becoming rulers. You can see development happening," he added.
Video: Gulf News presents The Rise of a Nation
Learning experience
Even though she grew up in Dubai and has closely watched its every development, Najla said the process of short-listing the pictures was a learning experience for her. She said it revealed aspects of the UAE's modern history that would have easily been overlooked as trivial.
"One of the biggest challenges for us as editors was to have that balance and to be inclusive of all facets of life. Because there were so many pictures to go through, the selection process was more of what to exclude rather than what to include," she said.
The purpose of the book was partly to have a record of history and partly to put the history in context, she said. "You have all the different areas in the UAE and all the facets of life. It's not just the country's infrastructure and the business world."
The most challenging task in preparing the book was captioning. In an effort to ensure historical accuracy, the researchers for the book often had to turn to digitised archives of Gulf News to be able to determine the context in which the picture was taken.
Some pictures had to be taken to senior officials for confirmation of context and titles. Gulf News began moving to digital photography in 2001 and immediately started archiving digital pictures. Since then all pictures published in the paper are archived. Others that are not published are also archived and some others that are not published.
Decades worth of pictures
The challenging task however was the decades worth of pictures in hard copy the paper had kept in "vast filing cabinets" in a special archive in the Gulf News building, said Mathew.
In 2005, the paper embarked on an ambitious project to digitally archive every page and picture published by Gulf News. The project took about two years, and the publishing of The Rise of a Nation would have been significantly more difficult without it.
You can buy a copy of The Rise of a Nation at all major bookstores in the UAE for Dh200. Click here to buy online.
