JEDDAH, 18 February 2007 — A quiet spoken man with watchful eyes, Abdrahman Alhasani as both teacher of art and professional photographer communicates better through his pictures than with words.
No stranger to Germany, he has been visiting the country on and off for many years to study, but it was only after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 that he formed the idea of photographing it with a sense of purpose.
Originally trained as a painter, he visited Photkina — a major annual exhibition devoted to all things photographic — and decided almost overnight to enter the field of photography. “That was 27 years ago,” he said. “I was a student in the Institute of Art in Riyadh — I just became fascinated by the technology.”
Fine art was — and he admits through his constant reference to it — his first love. It was when he saw a series of photographs which repeated the strong form and use of high and low angles that he was familiar with in his drawings that he was convinced to try the camera rather than the pencil. “But I was young,” he said. “I read books, reference works and discovered that photography was a parallel course.” So he joined.
Alhasani described his increasing interest in photography in his early years in terms that at first sounded more like an engineer than an artist. “I became increasingly fascinated with the anatomy of the camera,” he mused. “For a long time I studied the makeup of lenses, the mechanics of focal plane and diaphragm shutters and the mechanics of a camera.”
He progressed from his entry level at 35mm to medium and finally large format cameras. Fully dedicated to his new art, he followed courses in Zurich in large format advertising photography and went to Basel to study the esoteric art of lighting for advertising, among other subtle skills.
He calls his exhibition, currently showing at the Atelier Gallery off Tahlia Street in Jeddah, “Germany Through Arabian Eyes.”
Responding to the rhetorical suggestion that anyone with a modern mid-range digital camera could have taken these photos, he smiled and said that the elements of the photos on display were a meld of science and art and pointed to several of his mood-filled dawn and evening twilight exhibits.
“The light in these matters,” he explained. “The eye — the artist part — judges when it is right to take the exposure. You must know when it is exactly right to take a sensitive picture. Balancing and filling in the light is the key.”
He said that possession of the best equipment and lenses can be an important part of the skill — but it is only part. As proof of his contention, many of the pictures were taken on a Nikon D70 — a medium level 6.1 megapixel 35mm format camera. Many modern amateur cameras have 10.1 megapixel sensors — which is fast becoming the industry standard.
Alhasani felt that the use of photo-manipulation programs, while useful, was only justifiable as a tool and could not substitute for the photographer or the knowledge of composition, moods or reasoning the photographer brought to the original exposure. “Many of the photos here,” he said indicating the exhibition around him, “are unprocessed — straight off the camera. The lighting, form, shadows — all this is as I saw it.”
He insisted, echoing his early obsession with the mechanic of photography, that there was no substitute for knowing your camera.
The exhibition of photographs, opened this week by Dr. Hubert Lang, consul general of Germany in Jeddah, and Khaled Juffali, chairman of the Saudi-German Business Group, shows Germany as picturesque and heavy with history and tradition. The nearest thing to a portrayal of its industrial arm is a low angle photograph of a high-speed train at rest.
The underlying idea for the exhibition was conceived when Alhasani decided that the Arab perception of the country had been formed very largely through its machines and industrial goods. “I felt that nobody knew its landscape, lakes, mountains or the traditions and people and a whole culture,” he said.
He said that it was his way of showing that the country was a whole culture, not just a series of products. “I mounted the exhibition as a message, a message for peace,” he said with a genuine sense of modesty. “The cultures of European countries are different, and there is a genuine wish for peace between all.”
The underlying theme, he said, was one of communication between Arab countries and cultures and others. By showing Germany as a whole and multifaceted culture and not just as a producer of finely engineered motor cars and industrial products, Alhasani wanted to open Arab eyes to the richness of cultures — German and European — otherwise unknown to them. “I want to make life better, sweeter between the cultures,” he said, pausing for a moment. “And art is the ambassador.”
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(Abdrahman Alhasani’s exhibition runs until Monday, Feb. 19 at the Atelier Gallery, off Jeddah’s Tahlia Street near the International Market.)
