Exhibit Review: Dubai Photo Exhibition, 16-19 March 2016

I’m not much in the mood to write a long description of the exhibit:  the sponsors, the concept, design, number of peices, types of work, artists represented.  I think anyone who finds this blog post can find most of that information at the exhibition website.  I did, though, want to leave a post as a record of attendance and to perhaps also make a note of those artists I discovered and about whom I’d like to know more.

Friday morning was a good time to attend as there were few visitors and thus no body contact with strangers, annoying cell phone conversations, or crying children.  In fact I think there were more men in black suits - the event security team - than visitors.

Missing at the exhibit was any effort to commercialize on the event through the sale of prints, postcards, books, t-shirts and the like.  The coffee shop had a sizable collection of books, mostly from Prince Hamdan’s annual photo contests, but for display only.

The exhibit was curated and organized by nationality, so you had the rather peculiar effect of one country’s work being represented by a couple of dozen images.  The Korean collection, for example, was composed of soft-colored rural landscapes and their garish urban counterparts.  Just walking through the exhibit without paying any attention to the signage, it was not always clear what each curator’s organizing principle might have been.  France stressed historical development, with examples of some of photography’s oldest images. Japan and Germany were largely modern.   UAE had a mix of historical (largely documentary), along with several examples of modern concept art.

The Brazilian section was perhaps the strongest as it featured work of photographers interested in formal elements of image making, such as tone, form, and line.  Genres included street, urban landscape, aerial, and still life.  I didn’t know any of these artists prior to seeing their work at this exhibit, but what was displayed left me wanting to see more.  Short bibliographies would have been helpful to visitors wanting to follow-up and learn more about the image makers we discovered at the exhibit:

• Ademar Manarini (1920-1989, Brazil )
• Georges Radó (1907 – 1998, Hungarian who emigrated to Brazil 1939)
• José Yalenti (1895-1967, Brazil)
• Marcel Giró (1913-2011, Spanish who emigrated to Brazil)
• Paulo Pires (1928, Brazil)

As attendance was free, it would be churlish to criticize whatever small faults there may have been (apart from the parking lot attendants having to eat their boxed lunches in the parking lot - couldn’t someone have provided them a bit of indoor space?) and in fact we should be offering our thanks to all those who sponsored the event and made it available to the public.

Creative staff get an indoor buffet

Not part of the exhibit

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