THE LONG READ: NYUAD’S CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY UNVEILS A NEW COLLECTION OF ANTIQUE IMAGES FROM THE MIDDLE EAST
The National, UAE
March1 2 2015
James Langton
March 12, 2015
The four young women have been living in a box for many years, perhaps
even decades. Exposed to daylight once more, they meet the observer’s
eye with a steady, serious gaze, wearing clothes that suggest comfort
more than fashion.
Behind them is a panorama of shapes familiar to tourists; the Sphinx
and the pyramids at Giza, a world they are physically prevented
from entering by a barbed wire fence but perhaps also by their sex
and circumstances. Yet the intimacy of the group suggests a close
friendship that will long outlast the fraction of a second it takes
for the camera’s shutter to open and close.
The box that was their home, before the women metamorphosed into the
digital realm, found its way to a Cairo street market and then, for
probably just a few pounds, into the hands of an Egyptian photographer,
Yasser Alwan.
Today the women might be said to live in Abu Dhabi, scanned, coded
and tagged as part of a new digital photo archive that will have its
roots in the Middle East but which will belong to everyone.
Alwan has been collecting, as well as taking, photographs for many
years. It is now a large collection, assembled from single images,
from discarded boxes of prints and negatives, and from cast-out
family albums.
The photos date from the 1920s through to the 1950s, although some
are much older. Most likely, all the subjects – and the photographers
– are dead, which is why they were thrown out, to be sold in flea
markets and -second-hand bookshops.
Alwan’s collection has now been acquired by Akkasah, the Centre for
Photography at New York University Abu Dhabi. Akkasah can mean camera
in the dialect of the Gulf, with its roots in the Arabic word for
reflection. In this context, both are relevant and appropriate.
The director of Akkasah is Shamoon Zamir, an associate professor at
the university with a background in both literature and photographic
studies; Ozge Calafato, a journalist who previously worked for the
Abu Dhabi Film Festival, is the project -manager.
If these two are effectively the driving force behind Akkasah, then the
vision is much larger. This is an attempt to establish NYU Abu Dhabi,
and by extension, the UAE, as a centre of excellence for research
into photography.
“For me personally,” says Zamir, “this is another way of signalling
by NYU Abu Dhabi that we want to be here for a long time. That we are
not just fly-by-night, that we are not just making money and getting
out of here. This thing only makes sense over a 10 to 15-year period.”
Alwan’s collection represents the first step. “He’s an old friend,”
says Zamir, “and we knew that he had the collection but didn’t know
what to do with it. So we got into a discussion.” The result is that
Akkasah owns the images, but Alwan retains the commercial copyright.
It is a deal that serves as a model for future acquisitions, with
the centre creating a photo library that stops short of being a
commercial enterprise.
Alwan’s collection numbers around 3,000 photographs. They are slices
of time captured in a fraction of a second. Often all that is known
is the name of the photographic studio, stamped on the prints.
Even if the identities of the subjects and the locations are a subject
of conjecture, they offer tiny insights into the past. A young man
in a sharp suit pulls out the pockets of his trousers in imitation of
Charlie Chaplin. A family of nine, from the matriarch to the youngest
children, pose by a foreign coast that is clearly not Egypt, with
a ship crudely pasted in the background. Is this a message to those
still home from a new world and new life, or a memory of somewhere
left behind?
Other images are even more startling. A location that is clearly
not Cairo comes into focus as pre-war Germany. Here is the stadium
for the 1936 Olympic Games, and that tiny figure on the balcony is
the National Socialist fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. A second image shows an
athletics final. The runner bursting to the front is black. Almost
certainly this is the American sprinter Jesse Owens, at the exact
moment of confounding the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority.
As far as they can tell, says Zamir, an Egyptian man had a romance
with a German woman that somehow ended in Berlin.
Part of the collection, says Zamir, are several hundred photographs
from the same family: “Which is quite sad – presumably someone has
dumped these because someone has died. But also you can see the whole
generations developing through these photographs.”
Another group of images seems to have been returned to the Cairo
studio that took them. Not because the subjects were dissatisfied
but the opposite, judging from the messages written on the reverse:
“‘Out of affection’,” says Zamir, “But I don’t know what it means.”
The process of turning essential boxes of cast-out junk into a
meaningful resource involves, he admits, a “pretty steep learning
curve”, but one of the strengths of Akkasah is that it is part of
one of the world’s leading universities.
“Even if we have scholars here who are not photographic experts but
know something, say about Egyptian history, we can sit down with them
and say: ‘Look at this dress – is it from the 1930s or 1940s? How
old is this building, what is this building, do you recognise this
neighbourhood of Cairo?’ So slowly we build up.”
After Egypt, the plan is to continue collecting abandoned images in
the same way from other Middle East countries: “Morocco, Tunisia,
Yemen – if we can,” says Zamir.
The only other project in the region on this is the Arab Image
Foundation, based in Beirut. “We get asked: ‘Why are you doing this
when there is the Arab Image Foundation?'” says Zamir. “And I point out
that this is an ethnocentric and almost racist connotation, because no
one says: ‘Why is Paris building a photo archive when Vienna already
has one, or London?’ The Arab world is rich and diverse.”
Certainly Akkasah is unique in the Arabian Gulf, for while Qatar is
known to have assembled a large collection for a planned museum of
photography, the project appears to be on hold.
Akkasah, though, will be more than a database of images. “Once we get
the ball rolling on this, it’s not just a matter of putting these
things in boxes and having them here,” explains Zamir. “We have to
build a programme of scholarship around it so that we have resident
scholars, people coming to visit the archive, maybe fellowships on
Middle Eastern photography, courses and workshops.”
The first of these, which also served as a launch party for the
project, took place this week: a three-day conference, Photography’s
Shifting Terrain: Emerging Histories & New Practices, that invited
more than 30 of the world’s leading scholars of photography to the
Saadiyat campus, including the Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas,
who has been working in Kurdistan since the early 1990s and gave a
public talk.
A glance at the list of papers presented over the three-day event
illustrates the potential of Akkasah, although, as we shall shortly
see, it also, perhaps unwittingly, also suggests an apparent black
hole in the study of photography in the region.
Subjects included Shima Ryu, believed to be Japan’s first woman
photographer, who was working in the 1860s, and Latif Al Ani, an Iraqi
documentary photographer born in the 1930s and still living in Baghdad,
but who apparently hung up his camera, unable or unwilling to continue,
after Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979.
Many of the papers focused on the Ottoman Empire, which ruled much of
the region through to 1918; a period in which photography established
itself as an artistic medium. It was a time when Turkey was anxious
that the world perceive it as a forward-thinking, modern culture and
photography was critical in presenting the right -image.
Tourists, of course, had other ideas, flocking to the Middle East
with heads bursting with Orientalist fantasies. The local commercial
photographers were happy to oblige, not just by perching their
European visitors on camels in front of the Pyramids, but cloaking
them in Arab robes, both male and female, in fake studio sets that
represented the harem or desert tent – an enterprise that incidentally
that still continues in several UAE shopping malls today.
A great number of the region’s first professional photographers,
from Istanbul to Cairo, were Armenian. The work of studios like
the Abdullah Freres and David Abdo Studios, in Jerusalem, includes
carefully posed portraits, but also a record of local artisans,
landmarks and street scenes.
Joseph Malakian, of the Middle East and Armenian Photo Archive, who
presented a paper on the conference’s final day, suggests that the
Armenians, as the second-largest minority in the -Ottoman Empire,
were more likely to be both involved in commerce and, as a result of
contact with Christian missionaries, more likely to embrace western
technologies.
He quotes from one Armenian photographer, interviewed in Jordan in
1980, whose words ring true today for the Middle East’s beleaguered
minorities: “We are a minority and have no worries about making
pictures; above all, in the time of persecutions we had to be able
to swiftly begin life again ‘naked’ in a new place. Skills cannot be
robbed and we could always get new lenses and paper wherever we fled.”
Out of around 34 papers presented over three days, the organisers
estimate that about two-thirds related to the Middle East. Topics
included work by contemporary Palestinian artists, perspectives on
Iran and many aspects of photography under Ottoman rule. There were
also papers on Uganda, Benin and Ghana, and an examination of black
portraiture in the United States during the American Civil War.
Only one, though, directly addressed the photographic history of
the country in which Akkasah and New York University Abu Dhabi is
based: the UAE. This is a familiar issue. The Arab Image Foundation
has barely a handful of photographs from the Emirates in its huge
collection. Most of the world’s major photographic agencies hold
selections that might charitably be described as random. Yet life
here has been well-recorded on film since at least the middle of the
previous century. The issue is visibility.
The single exception at last week’s gathering was Michele Bambling,
whose Lest We Forget initiative is supported by the Salama Bint
Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. Bambling, a former professor at Zayed
University, has encouraged young Emiratis to share images from their
family collections, showing them to the public at two Qasr Al Hosn
Festivals and with the intention of publishing them in a book.
Zamir says Lest We Forget is the first step in establishing a
vernacular of Emirati photography. Akkasah, he says, is not a
competitor to Bambling or the Arab Image Foundation, but a partner.
The centre, he says, will focus more in the future on the UAE,
particularly seeking out private collections created by expatriate
families. “I think it is really useful if we can work with migrant
communities that have been here for many many years. We don’t have
to own them [the photographs], we just have to digitalise, catalogue
and build up life stories around them.”
Other ideas under consideration include an archive of profiles of
eminent Emiratis: “It’s one way of persuading other Emiratis to
work with us.” The centre has also started commissioning independent
photographers to produce new documentary work centred on the UAE. “It
is a rich documentation of UAE life that in time will become historic,”
he explains.
Creating a database that fully represents Emirati life was always
going to be “a very difficult task”, Zamir accepts, not just in
locating sources of images but also overcoming a cultural reluctance
to share them. In time, he hopes, Akkasah will play a part in helping
to recognise the importance of these collections and preserving them
for the future. “There is a younger generation of students coming
up who are going to have a very different attitude,” he says. “But
unless someone collects it now, it will be gone.”
James Langton is a senior editor at The National.
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/the-review/the-long-read-nyuads-centre-for-photography-unveils-a-new-collection-of-antique-images-from-the-middle-east#full