Photographic Encounters along the Gulf Coasts

An exhibition of 165 photographs and archival documents from the collection of Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah, that provides a starting point for research into how photography translates and interprets history. On permanent display at Sharjah Art Foundation’s new Photography Gallery in Al Manakh, the exhibition features late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century glass slides depicting people, places and activities along the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean coasts; “these images speak in some ways to notions of power, class, gender and ethnicity, signalling the prevailing cultural attitudes of the time” as the press release puts it.

Above: ‘Busra [sic] creek’, late 19th to early 20th century