Zooming in on Bahrain

Economic growth and increasing private wealth have directly impacted the landscape of the island of golden smiles and the changing face of Bahrain has been captured in all its glory by award-winning photographer Camille Zakharia, reports Anasuya Kesavan.

The story of the changing kingdom has been narrated through a series of photo-montages in his latest exhibition 'Double Vue' which opens on May 7 at Maison Jamsheer in Muharraq.

Hosted by the Alliance Franaise in Bahrain, 38 of the original 52 composite images, captured over eight years, will be on view in one of the best preserved traditional houses on the island, which is also a cultural centre dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of issues related to architecture and urban development in the kingdom.

Camille Zakharia is a Canadian citizen, born in Lebanon who now lives in Gufool. All exhibits were made by combining images of Bahrain's urban landscape and are devoid of human intervention.

He explained that his works are a documentation of the kingdom's changes and that the absence of people in 'Double Vue' has been subconscious. He said: "The works are in fact, about people, or rather than about the evidence of people living in a place.

"In many ways, the changes in people's living environments mirror the changes in their culture, and so, when people move from the village to an apartment in a high rise building, for example, along with that move they adopt more 'urban' ways of doing things and shed some of their more 'rural' habits.

"It is that evolution that I hope I've captured in my work.

"I first became fascinated by architecture when I moved to Beirut to study engineering and found that the devastation of the city's buildings echoed the devastation that its people felt."

Camille has held several exhibitions world over and has won several international awards. In last year's International Photography Awards in New York he won first prize in the fine art section for a photo collage and in the people category notched another top accolade for his 'family' image.

Olivier Huynh-Van, director of Alliance Franaise, who invited Camille to present the new exhibition, said: "Zakharia has called Bahrain home for the last eight years during which time he has gotten to know its streets, towns, villages, alleys, farms and barren desert intimately.

"Bahrain has presented him with a unique opportunity: to document the process of hybridisation, a task made all the more challenging by the diversity of the country's urban landscape.

"Ranging from Muharraq, which has been described as an archetypal Islamic town (Yarwood) and Bahrain's villages, to its government housing projects of the 1960s to 1980s, its compounds and its newly-mushrooming skyscrapers and new developments, Bahrain is blending the old with the new and a resultant culture is in the process of emerging.

"Through this exhibition we are inviting viewers to reflect on the impact of this wealth on the cultural and social development of the country and its impact on the people of Bahrain."

Art critic Sulaf Zakharia writes in her review: "Zakharia's photographs are an emotionally charged visual narrative that captures the complexity of the encounter between the traditional and the new in a study of stark contrasts.

"Despite the conspicuous absence of people in this body of work, it is nonetheless about people. Zakharia questions whether it is humanly possible to be psychologically and intellectually prepared for such drastic social changes as those wrought by the new oil wealth which has manifested itself most clearly in urban growth. His photos show evidence of a people holding on nostalgically to the vestiges of a dated lifestyle."

Double Vue will be on display until June 25. The photographs are also on sale. They are archival inkjet prints, printed on rag papers and are framed in classic black wooden frames with double mounts.