Ras Al-Khaimah – The Frankfurter – Editorial
Luxury travel photography in Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates. Large-format prints hang on steel frames in the sand lanes between the ruins, one work…
An editorial from Ras Al Khaimah for THE FRANKFURTER — and the real find was an open-air photography exhibition in an abandoned coral-stone village. Large-format prints hang on steel frames in the sand lanes between the ruins, one work leans in a doorway, a row of pieces runs along a mud-brick wall. Alongside them the palm-frond hut with its carpets where a man in a white kandura prepares tea, the watchtower above the roofs, and the view across the village in evening light.
Photographing art against a setting like this means holding both layers: the picture and the place it hangs in. Go close and you reproduce somebody else's work. Stay too far back and you show a wall with colored patches on it. So the frames stand at an angle to the row, letting the prints stack up in perspective — one work complete and legible at the front, the rest receding behind it as far as the tower at the end of the lane.
The sun is the real opponent here. Over sand and pale mud brick there is barely a surface at midday that does not act as a reflector, while anything in shadow swallows its own detail. So the work happens in the first and the last hour: then the sun is low enough for the walls to gain texture, the frames to throw a shadow, and the sky above the mud roofs to have color in it.
The tea hut is the counterweight. Inside it is dark, outside the sand is burning, and the difference runs to several stops. The exposure goes on the face and the hands at the kettle; the bright rectangle of the doorway is allowed to blow, because in that frame it has nothing to say.
And the overview from the roof is the picture that carries the story. It shows in one frame what the text claims: that an exhibition is hanging in a village nobody lives in any more.
- Country
- VAE
