Girls of Dubai: Gulfography's First

"The Girls of Dubai are here!  As tribute to the Dubai exhibition 'Privately' that was the inspiration for founding Gulfography.com, we decided to make selected pictures from this exhibition as our first official gallery.  All photos in this collection are taken by female photographers based in Dubai. It was my pleasure to to share their work with all those who stopped by the Gallery of Light in Dubai and now we want share it with the rest of the world.  Below is an excerpt from my statement as the curator of the exhibition.  It will give you insight into what strings these amazing collection of photos together."             

--Shammi Samano (co-founder of Gulfography)  

  

"On Curating the Private"

I’ve lived a lot of places…too many actually.  I’ve called everything from Iraq to the U.S. to Egypt to Spain and now the UAE my “home” for some period of time or another.  And when you first arrive somewhere new, you’re immediately drawn to the most obvious cultural traits that differentiate this place from all the other places you’ve been.

What fascinated me since I first arrived in Dubai three years ago was how thick the line separating the public and private was in local Emirati culture, much thicker than in the West. I saw this play out in the most obvious and subtle ways in the public culture at large but in a much more personal way with my students—all college-aged Emirati women.  Through our endless conversations and interactions, they’ve been my biggest teachers in trying to understand this particular cultural lesson.

Therefore, the theme of the this exhibition, “Private-ly”, was inspired after three years of being taught by my own students all the nuances of what the “public” and “private” means to them.  And more importantly, how they negotiate their lives according to the rules that govern the world of the private and those that govern what is allowed to spill over into the world of the public. 

In preparing for this exhibit, I asked my photography students to artistically explore what is personally private to them and then share it in the very public space of an art gallery with the hope that this would give us all an opportunity to reflect on that separation and its consequences. Ultimately, I believe that it is only by exploring the intensely personal that we can even begin to understand larger social dynamics. Hence, the use of the Arabic "ly" in the title—denoting something that belongs to someone.

We hope you enjoy this small photographic journey into the private world of the girls of Dubai…