PORTRAITS ON THE SEAFRONT

End of academic year at Portsmouth. I went down to the seafront with Danielle and Sissellinn to try out a new Nikon Speedlight 900 with my medium format film cameras. We were hoping for a long summer evening but the weather decided otherwise and we got absolutely soaked !

 

 

Welcome

Greetings to all,

Welcome to the launch of my blog which will cover various projects, photographic and academic, as well as different strands of interest. I intend to update it bi-monthly but in the first month or so, I  may post more frequently as there is a backlog of projects and photo-shoots that needs to be published.

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AHRC Award : Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities

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Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: 
Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories

Leeds University and Birkbeck College 

(January 2013 – June 2014) :

I will be the visual advisor for this project working with my colleagues: Dr. Jay Prosser (Main investigator / University of Leeds), Dr. Gabriel Koureas (University of London, Birkbeck) and Dr. Colette Wilson (Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London). We have just heard that we been awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a Networking Scheme and I will be posting more information on my blog in the near future.

This is brief summary of  the project : 

 'The cities of the Ottoman Empire were multiple, multicultural and are at once heavily memorialised and contemporarily relevant.  Our research on ex-Ottoman cities contributes to the Translating Cultures theme by travelling from the present back to the past cosmopolitan city-worlds of the Empire; by a focus on transcultural memories, which involves comparative analysis of the exchanges between different Ottoman city cultural groups; and by an interdisciplinary methodology.  The cosmopolitan memories of the Ottoman past have much to teach us about our present multicultural cities.'

THE WORLD IN LONDON

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

'The World in London' is a major large-scale, public art project initiated by the Photographers Gallery and supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympic Games. To represent each of the nations participating in the Olympics, a total of 204 portraits were commissioned of 204 Londoners. The project aims to celebrate the diversity of London's population and of photographic portraiture. More information to be found on the Website:

www.theworldinlondon.org.uk

I was commissioned for this project to represent Jordan for which I had two sitters Yasmine and Amir and this portrait of Yasmine, by the river in Chiswick, was the one that was finally selected:

 

The final images are exhibited as public art across London:

Victoria Park, Grove Road, London E3:                                                        27 July – 12 August 2012

Park House, 453-497 Oxford Street, London W1 (opp. Selfridges):             27 July – 30 August 2012

Below is a selection from both photo-shoots in Chiswick and Bankside:

 

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Brief Outline of concepts for both portraits:

Yasmine was fasting for Ramadan and therefore had to eat before day breaks. Fasting for a whole month, between sunrise and sunset, is meant to increase your spiritual awareness and bring about a renewed energy. For this portrait, I started thinking about how many of us try to bring about some ‘slowness’ into one’s life through rituals, religious or other, and/or try to find solace in some more secluded spaces in the city.  All these portraits were taken on a deserted riverbank in Chiswick in the first light of day.

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Amir has been working in Central London for several years and for this portrait, I was thinking that many arrive on the doorsteps of a metropolis like London with his or her dream of urbanity in search of new beginnings. However, well before reaching a metropolis like London, many would already have a mediatised view of it borne out the countless films and TV shows hence the cinematic quality of many of these portraits.