| The contrast of blue sky and white building is always striking as these photographs of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi illustrate. But beyond the contrast of blue and white, the mosque appealed to me because of the profusion of symmetrical forms it displayed. The domes and arches are quintessential elements of much Arabic architecture and I enjoyed capturing them with my camera, but also in combining them in non-symmetrical compositions. While most of my photographs of the mosque emphasize stillness and tranquility, the site was emphatically not quiet. It has become a major tourist destination. One of the photos captures this aspect of the mosque’s reality and another, in a kind of inverse relation, the labour that goes in maintaining it and, by allusion, that constructed it in the first place. | |
