Should you find yourself stranded, courtesy of BA or anyone else, at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 over the next couple of months and fancy something a bit more cultural with your shopping take a look at photographer Henry Reichhold’s pictures of Dubai and Mumbai.
Mounted on two large, undulating screens all of the photos were taken using the Nokia N86 camera phone – yes there is a strong element of product placement here – which seems to me the equivalent of a magician extracting hundreds of silk scarves from an egg. The largest image in the exhibition, a panorama of Dubai, is apparently the size of a double decker bus and was created by stitching together dozens of pictures using Photoshop and some other kind of wizardry I can’t even lay a name to. Actually perhaps it’s just called talent.
This digital sleight of hand and the exhibition’s location in an airport lounge means Reichhold’s decision to chose Dubai as one of his featured locations seems entirely apt. The city’s ability to import whatever it wants from lobsters to architects in the name of turning its latest pipe dream into steel and concrete gives it a mirage-like quality – and for my next trick…
Reichhold says his exhibition “visually maps the polar opposites of two of the world’s most extreme urban dwellings…Dubai is a showcase of extraordinary wealth, development and architecture, while Mumbai is an extraordinarily vibrant city driven by the resilience and incredible good nature of its people who live for the most part in poverty.”
I see his point but one of the interesting things about this exhibition is the way that premise could easily be reversed. India’s economic boom must mean there are plenty of penthouse apartments springing up in Mumbai whilst a look at lives of migrant workers in the Gulf from countries like India would reveal some pretty poverty stricken living conditions.
Reichhold’s pictures of Dubai are mostly architectural set pieces, façade images that have the feel of a glossy brochure caressing the fingertips. People are mostly absent or appear as tiny accessories sunbathing on a beach. Some of the most effective pictures like one of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, taken through a mist of water from ornamental fountains play up to the city’s illusory, smoke and mirrors nature.
The huge bus sized panorama of Dubai conveys the impression of a place that is both overwhelming and fragile. The Burj Khalifa sits in the centre like a hypodermic syringe filled with quicksilver surrounded by artificial lakes and freeways and clusters of lesser skyscrapers. Unlike many cities Dubai looks more substantial at night, its neon lights part of an older dream long imagined by abstract artists and city planners armed with nothing more than pencils and graph paper.
If you’re someone who thinks a large part of photography is about capturing the human gaze then you will find Reichhold’s pictures of Mumbai much more engaging than his vistas of Dubai. These pictures are street corner shots full of people buying and selling, cooking and washing clothes. They capture the kind of impromptu moments that get you speculating about people’s lives and motives and what happened next. What is the magazine clutched so tightly by the young girl in the pink and black dress? How are those leaves piled up like a tower of green filo pastry in a tiny shop used?
Reichhold makes the interesting point that people are rarely wary or defensive about having their picture taken by something as small and unobtrusive as a mobile phone camera. Whether these tiny cameras will continue to be seen as amateur and inconsequential as the quality and sophistication of the pictures they can take improves remains to be seen.
The enormous gap in material living conditions between street life in Mumbai and a penthouse in Dubai was summed up for me in the picture of a young girl sitting on a roof next to a plastic jerry can. I imagine the can is used to carry water, a necessity which took me straight back to Dubai and its towers in the desert. How water is supplied to a building like the Burj Khalifa is beyond my technical imagination though I did read somewhere of a plan to use nuclear power to desalinate sea water to supply Dubai.
It’s easy to feel uneasy about Dubai, with its insane energy consumption and idiotic optimism – apparently the Burj Khalifa is built near an earthquake fault line. Yet putting aside the issue of the treatment of migrant workers – admittedly a big problem to side-step and one far from confined to Dubai – I admire the place’s hubris and chutzpah and hope it isn’t all going to crumble back into the desert post credit crunch. After all without hubris humans wouldn’t have created cities at all.
Image of Dubai © Henry Reichhold
