Lamia Gargash: Stories of Interior Spaces

The Staircase, Lamia Gargash (2005-6)

I first discovered Lamia Gargash's photography in a British Council exhibition, My Father's House a few years ago; a travelling exhibition, its first port of call was at Bait al Baranda museum, Muscat and while I admired the other featured photographers' works, I instantly gravitated towards Lamia's images, particularly those of interior spaces that she had photographed.

As a child, I had always loved reading about interiors and how people chose to decorate their homes; what and how they put together their homes revealed so much about themselves. However, as I grew older, while my fascination for gorgeously and unusually assembled interior interiors remained undiminished, I found myself looking beyond the picture-perfect images in glossy interior magazines and websites. I realised I wanted to see more of interiors which were unvarnished, a little rough around the edges: faces wiped clean of make-up, so to speak. These were interiors with personalities and quirks of their own, in a constant state of evolution. 

Window Light, Lamia Gargash (2005-6)

While Lamia has since then worked with other subjects, I still retain my affinity for her 'Presence' series. Starkly devoid of people, these are piercing portraits of spaces - and yet, they are also portraits of those invisible inhabitants occupying those spaces as well, documenting their presence through the way they choose to present their most immediate spaces. I find her images of abandoned buildings and structures particularly haunting and powerful: even in or perhaps, because of their derelict state, they are palimpsests, each layer reverberating with voices and echoes and stories...only if you are willing to listen - and that is what precisely Lamia has accomplished through her images and coaxed her viewers to do so as well.

I was therefore thrilled to get the opportunity to speak to Lamia about her work via Khaleejesque and here is my interview with her reproduced below:
 

1) What made you choose photography as your medium of artistic expression?

Honestly speaking, as a child, I never ever thought of becoming an artist or photographer so it was a happy accident as to how I became one. When I had applied for my MA at Central Saint Martins, London, I actually applied for graphic design; however, I was then told that my work was more photographic and subsequently, placed in photography. I tried my best to get out of it as I wanted to pursue digital media; fate though had decided that photography was my destiny.

2) You mention in your biography that you were concerned with the relics of a self-renewing architecture and thereby documenting the private and public realms of Emirati architecture. Could you further elaborate on this statement in context to any of your particular projects?

I love what the camera captures, paying attention to details and using it to record and preserve what intrigues me. Space is a hub for many changes that occur around us; it dictates not only styles and eras but also a way of living. How a room is experienced leaves many stories within its walls. One always looks at the outside word as a sign of progression and expansion but the true essence of change occurs within our own quarters. How one identifies himself within his own room and how he chooses to present his individuality and persona through it is what’s exciting.

Through 'Presence,' I sought to document a culture that exists in interiors and becoming extinct due to modernization and globalization. When I first started this project, I was studying in UK; coming back home, I was more aware of the changes happening and felt the desire to document my old home – and the work developed from there. I documented homes of people, who were shifting from them to newer ones as well as recording abandoned homes.

People always ask me why there are no people present in my photographs. To me the spaces and interiors not only narrate stories of the lives that existed in them but also give the viewer an insight into our culture: how swiftly things change in our country, the rate at which things are being destroyed and built is probably more obvious in the space we inhabit on a daily basis than merely the exterior urban landscape.

The Orange Room, Lamia Gargash (2005-6)

Meelas-Yadee, Lamia Gargash (2005-6)

3) Many of these spaces are clearly private residences. How was it photographing these private and intimate spaces?

I found that documenting private spaces was much harder than taking someone’s portrait. Also, as we live in a quiet, conservative society, which admires and respects privacy so taking one’s photographs is quite a challenge enough – but taking pictures of their private spaces was even more challenging. Many perceived it as an intrusion and invasion of privacy to expose their most intimate spaces, whether it be kitchen, bedroom or even bathroom. They would question: why would anyone be interested in living quarters? Go photograph the garden or the sunset instead! Initially it was very hard but I gradually found a language by which I was able to communicate my message.

4) The Brownbook collaboration focused on the Emiratis' fixation with the label, Louis Vuitton. How did that materialize? What kind of a commentary were you making through this project?

The idea behind this project was to showcase the idea of the brand LV being submerged in our everyday lives and presented in a series of photographs that had a vintage feel. I am an avid film user and almost all my work is shot on film; despite the difficulties associated with its post-production, I love the anticipation of waiting to get my images back and not knowing what they truly look like. The use of film helped capture the mood that Brownbook and Louis Vuitton were looking for.

I was given a brief and asked to recreate it in candid old school shots. The idea was to keep the images as honest as possible. “Presence” actually was its visual guideline; the mood and style of the photographs inspired the creation of the Louis Vuitton series.

6) I found the 'Through the Looking Glass' project very relevant and topical, considering the almost obsessive preoccupation many people have their appearance. You include subjects belonging to both sexes and a spectrum of nationalities and ages. How did the participants feel about becoming involved? What did you take away from this project?

Through the Looking Glass investigates how we constantly view ourselves in comparison to an ever-elusive standard, prompted by the constant bombardment of media imagery dictating ‘how we should look’. Minor defects become drastic, resulting in even more drastic measures undertaken to reach that ideal standard of beauty. Our self- perception, and subsequently our identity, becomes indistinct, as if viewing ourselves through a distorted looking glass.

The photographic series comprises of diptychs, with one panel depicting a portrait of the subject as seen by the world, and an opposing panel depicting the subject as seen through their mind’s eye.

In many ways all the portraits I have created for this series is a representing of my own insecurities. We live in a world that is bombarded with information and supposed accepted norms be it behavior or physical appearances. I have to admit I am one of those people whose lack of confidence affects me on a daily basis and I was keen on expressing that simple emotion and capture it photographically.

Finding my models was a challenge too as not everyone wants to have themselves presented in such a manner; it was crucial to have committed participants as it was a very delicate, time/money-consuming project.

I found that females were more receptive and excited about the project than men; they in turn were more reserved. The people I worked with were co-operative and understanding; I couldn't have asked for a better crew or cast. I also would like to thank Emirates Foundation who helped fund the project.

7) Your projects have included a gamut of subjects and themes: architecture, fashion, and dynamics of perception. Your project, Yadee however revolves around your grandfather and is therefore much more intimate and personal. What made you take up this project? What was the journey like?

My grandfather was such a strong character in my family; he had a healthy, active, athletic persona, who loved life, travelling and being young. However, he had a severe fall few years back that shifted his whole world and in many ways affected him deeply. For me, coming to terms with the situation was hard and took a while. The series of images of my grandfather (who is still alive) merely captures the sad aftermath of the whole situation. It showcases vulnerability, sorrow and isolation. It is almost like being introduced to a whole new family member. I am a keen observer: I pay attention to so many details that it overwhelms me and the fact that I find it hard to accept change leaves me lingering in the details, trying to grasp whatever I can through my photographs. Every project I have documented or created was an outcome of personal melancholy or pure inner reflections.

8) Would you like to talk about any future projects?

I have been working on a variety of business creative ventures with my sisters and family; however, regarding my next photo project, it will be a marriage between my love of interiors and implementing more of the“self” in the body of work. I still believe that there is still a lot to investigate in the idea of space and that there is still plenty that it has to offer as creative material. After all stories take place in every room in every house, building and structure and allowing the spectator to form his own narrative. How space is constructed and how we choose to embed ourselves within it is inspiring for me.

**You can read the interview in Khaleejesque here**

Illusion: 'A Tale of Four Cities'

Here is a literary (or creative, if you please) non fiction piece, Illusion on my shopping experiences in Dubai which was published in the newly launched online literary magazine, A Tale of Four Cities. Chronicling narratives from the cities of New York, London, Mumbai, and Dubai, the magazine is looking forward to receiving submissions from writers, especially those writing about Mumbai and Dubai. 

I, for one, both enjoyed reading the different vignettes from each city and also, writing about Dubai. In general, when it comes to my creative writing pieces, I usually find it difficult to write about the Gulf Middle East, which has been my home for much of my life. However, perhaps due to a few posts I have written for this blog and pieces such as these, my resistance to writing about my current homeland is gradually crumbling and I am finding it easier to respond to and  represent it in my writing. In fact, I am also currently working on a short story which captures much of the atmosphere of the early days of shopping in Dubai.

And here is the link to the piece as it appeared in the magazine...

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For some odd reason, the only photographs that I happen to have of Dubai in my possession are ones featuring my family and me in its streets, markets, and malls over the decades. Take this one: my toddler brother and I awkwardly stand amid the sun-bleached chaos of Deira. In another, taken just before I began university, I playfully wreathe my face with a patently faux vine of creepers; the same trip also witnesses me warily standing by a mannequin. Yet, where is Dubai amid it all? Are these shopping-centric photographs testimony to the fact that shopping is the only and ultimate way to define my relationship with Dubai?

Having lived in Muscat, Oman for most of my childhood and adult life and thus, in relatively close proximity to Dubai, I have always largely associated Dubai with a simultaneous sense of holiday and familiarity. While Muscat was content in remaining a backwater, Dubai patently did not exercise similar aspirations and accordingly gained an exciting hold for us Muscat denizens. During Eid and Oman’s National Day holidays, Muscat would witness a virtual mass exodus of its population to Dubai; it was common to find Dubai roads crowded with Oman’s distinctive mustard-yellow license plated cars or bumping into one’s colleagues and classmates at shopping malls.

Dubai was that veritable Aladdin’s Cave of shopping: ombre-hued chiffon saris from Meena Bazaar, blankets from wholesale markets where Persians sold them in floppy, transparent plastic suitcases, and Lladro figurines from Al Ghurair Shopping Centre. Once, when Ramadan fell during January, we walked the entire length of Al Fahidi Street one cold night before reluctantly calling it a night at 2am.

During summer Dubai trips, in the brief pockets of time spent outside when flitting between shops and taxis, we would smell an exclusively Gulf urban scent: petrol fumes and roasting shwarma converging with dry, intense heat. Lunching in Indian restaurants with oilcloth-covered tables and plastic vases containing faux yellow roses, we would consume thali while watching Zee TV’s then most famous soap, Tara on 27-inch TVs. 

In little market squares studding Deira and Bur Dubai, we would transit from one textile store to another, the majority virtually indistinguishable from one another: the harsh, unflattering overhead white tube-lights, bolts of cloth in every pattern, color, texture, and fabric imaginable, and the glass-topped counters barricading us from the fabric. I would murder boredom by peering at what lay beneath the glass: catalogue pictures of statue-faced models wearing latest salwar-kameez designs or rummaging through cardboard boxes stuffed with freshly sheared scraps of cloth, which made excellent temporary scarves or blind-folds. Outside, in the lank, heavy air, we would walk past electronic stores, where crowds had gathered to watch India play one-day cricket matches on multiple, differently-sized TV-screens. 

I was unable to visit Dubai between 2001 and 2007 due to various reasons; however, it had been impossible in the interim to be unaware of the massive transformation that Dubai had undergone during those years and indeed, when I arrived in August 2007, the city seemed to be at the apogee of its extravagant reinvention. There was an overt sense of Dubai being prettily packaged for display which resultantly made it somewhat inaccessible and unattainable. 

Fresco at Mercato Mall

In this new, picture-perfect Dubai, I felt as if I was gradually losing my moorings altogether when migrating from one mall to another. Had it not been more or less reduced to that: city of malls, those palaces of illusions? At the Mall of Emirates, I peered at visitors reveling in the pleasure of encountering snow in Dubai of all places. At our next stop, at the Mercato mall, we examined quasi Italian-frescos and mock pastel façades while sunlight generously drizzled through the glass skylight into the crisp-autumn air cool interiors.

Dome at Ibn Battuta mall

Finally, in Ibn Battuta mall, which had brought together myriad worlds under one roof while depicting the journey of the eponymous 14^th century traveler, Ibn Battuta, they had even defiantly turned day into night. I felt as if I was in a movie set what with the faux buildings, streets, and the stars studding a mauve evening sky; the harsh daylight bleaching the world almost white seen through the entrance door seemed incidental. Which one of those worlds was real and ersatz respectively? Did it even matter? 

Faux evening at Ibn Battuta mall

 Like the accidental, incidental beam of sunlight, shopping seemed to have become irrelevant to our Dubai experience. When we strayed beyond the city perimeters and encountered the blank dun dunes, I wondered how long it would be before they would be transformed into yet another faux universe. Dubai was a work of progress then, the canvas constantly being re-painted, and improvisation being the name of the game. 

For some reason, once again, years have elapsed since my last Dubai visit and the gap has been sufficient enough to subsume the last visit into the many visits undertaken to Dubai over the years. So, even now, I cannot help but experience that feeling of ‘going to Dubai’: a sensation that has not quite yet evaporated from my childhood, which tastes of excitement and newness and acquisition. 

Going to Dubai involves the ritual of crossing the border, through the mountains, past the enormous rust-hued dunes at Hatta, and finally glimpsing the billboards: those gateways to the kingdom of shopping. By the time we approach the city outskirts, the skyline, citadels of that kingdom, deigns to appear in the distance: an unique mirage which becomes more and more solid the nearer you approach it. 

What we thought was illusion was real, after all; such is the thin line between illusion and reality. 

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Corinne Martin: Boutiques of Art

I recently got the opportunity to discover and interview the Saudi Arabia based artist, Corinne Martin through a piece I did for Khaleejesque.

I loved her retro-esque paintings of popular and iconic symbols of Arab pop culture. Having grown up in the Gulf myself, she depicts a world of images that I have more or less accepted as part of the visual scenery surrounding me - the familiar imagery of say, Miranda or Pepsi conveyed in the Arabic script, for example. The colors of her works are undeniably mint fresh and yet there was also this inescapable feel of vintage posters and labels, the colors having that hyper-real bleached quality. It makes you feel nostalgic - and yet, simultaneously able to re-live that past in the present.

One of my favorites was the Miranda with Border painting below:

Apart from exhibiting in galleries, Corinne's work is also displayed in boutiques such as Boutique DNA in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; it's an alternative to traditional exhibition spaces for art and I am always fascinated as to what happens to art when it's placed in spaces ostensibly designed for another purpose, away from the blank, white gallery space, for example. In the images below, the boutique itself is like a museum, judging from the meticulousness with which the items have been placed and arranged; the selection of the items and their arrangement are definitely not arbitrary and it seems that they are performing in a sense, vital, compelling stories hidden in them and which will only be uncovered when you look more closely. The addition of the paintings adds a further dynamic layer to the retail space: functioning as stand-alone pieces as well as engaging with the items in this boutique of a museum.

All images courtesy Corinne Martin

Camille Zakharia: Preserving Vanishing Cities within Cities

I have always nurtured a keen interest in architecture of the past; what essentially intrigues me is the fact that their inhabitants have long come and gone and yet, the buildings still continue to exist, a visual testament to the aesthetic trends and beliefs of the time and containing myriad unheard narratives within them. Even then, it is not as much as the painstakingly restored heritage buildings that catch my attention as ones in a state of ruin, their decaying appearance further contributing towards the drama of age and history that envelops them.

Given my abiding love for the old, my inclination towards urban architecture and photography may be surprising given that urban spaces are synonymous with modernity. Yet, even there, I gravitate towards older, static areas still existing within the dynamic city: apartment blocks in decline, anachronistic corner shops in times of glossy malls, and walls which have seen many a poster, graffiti scribble, and paint dribble upon their surface in their time. There is a particular atmosphere to such areas that individuates them from the rest in the city: the many cities within a city.

A year ago, when covering the exhibition, Kan Ya Ma Kan (Once Upon a Time) for Gulf News, I was able to meet the acclaimed Bahrain-based Lebanese photographer, Camille Zakharia, who has exhibited at Victoria and Albert Museum, London and participated in the Venice Biennial,to cite a few of his accomplishments. His website will reveal his impressive body of work and his multiple areas of interest; however, in context to Kan Ya Ma Kan and his urban photography displayed there, what interested me was the way he perceived and navigated the urban landscapes surrounding him (I must say here that I was fortunate enough to hear him share the back-stories behind the photographs). A city is undoubtedly an evolving being and he exactingly pinpoints the intersection of the old and new through searing images such as the one of newly razed buildings: the rooms were nonetheless still present with intact jarringly pastel-hued walls. The ceilings were long gone though, the sky having become their substitute instead.

I also admired the meticulous detail with which he photographed the interiors of this particular landscape, almost akin to the diligence that of an anthropologist documenting a culture that is in danger of extinction along with its habitat; like poetry seeks to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and illumine its many facets, I believe that Mr. Zakharia does just the same with his photography narratives of Gulf urbanscapes.

Take this image, Interior of Shop - Qatar, above, which is verily a portrait of the shop inhabitant's head-space: the black and white portrait (the added interest of the photographer photographing a photograph),the presence of calendars, and objects of religious significance. The cracks in the wall, the wires, and the pipes further contribute towards us imagining as to what the entire shop looks like. In this day of plastic-perfect,assembly-line and therefore, anonymous mall shops, shops such as these are as much retail as personal spaces, thus becoming valuable repositories of personal stories. What will happen to those stories if the shops disappear?

Mr Zakharia's photography of Gulf urbanscapes thus functions as a means to preserve these personal spaces and stories in a time when those landscapes rapidly changing. The sights surrounding us that we take for granted are in danger of disappearance; there is no permanent reality anymore, it seems, everything existing in a state of improvisation. In fact, our own memories are nebulous, quickly accepting the new status quo: it's up to technology such as photography to prove even our own memories correct.

Image provided with the kind permission of Mr Camille Zakharia