“The Third Eye” is the first personal photographic exhibition that opened on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1988, at the InterContinental Hotel Abu Dhabi, so I borrow the title from it for my Friday and Saturday articles, and the story of the camera being a companion on the road and travels, bringing fame and attention, and sometimes inviting problems and causing pitfalls.
Perhaps one of the things I love about traveling is photography, and carrying the camera, its equipment, and its lenses, despite its heavy burden that weighs on the shoulder, confuses the steps on the foot, and always makes you lag behind your travel companions, and sometimes disrupts the flow of their movement and the rhythm of their walk, and they often rebuke you: “Here you go, Nasser.. see you.” “Our last, they are as level as the Japanese in everything they photograph,” even though they had no work at the time, but the beautiful promise remains, and the soul’s wish to capture a beautiful shot or a happy or sad human moment, and freeze its time in a frame, which is something that warms the heart and brings happiness to the heart. Your day is then considered a happy day and a good omen, but not all cities are equal in this luck. Some are promising and give you a lot, while others are poor in human faces and artistic shots. In some cities, the camera and its equipment become a burden on you, and make you vulnerable to surveillance and follow-up. The smallest mistake, perhaps. Your enemy is from the fifth column, even though these countries are destitute of everything, and there is no point in even spying on them, but it is the suspicion of totalitarian regimes that have their own employees, bonuses, and privileges, and the joy of hunting a foreign spy, after which they, with their knowledge, will find the appropriate citizen to accuse of spying with foreign parties that have connections. By the forces of imperialism and its henchmen, the reactionary forces.
On the other hand, there are cities that rejoice at the camera and its owner, find favor with him, and people rejoice in him, and the simple ones among them often like that you take them with you in your travel bag. Some women who abstain from it would die rather than be in the scene, but they must like the picture first, as women usually You do not recognize the beautiful picture, as much as you think that it is the beautiful one in the picture. The exciting and dazzling pictures that the passionate photographer worked hard to capture, and of an artistic nature, which we can summarize as photographic professionalism, do not come like that, but behind them there are many things, talent, study, and knowledge of the language of aesthetics. , and the depth of the human and cultural dimensions in the shot, so what the photographer and the ordinary person see in a scene that took minutes is different in interpretation between them. The ordinary person may pass without any passing words, but the professional photographer must leave his mark and signature on what he is experiencing, as he is able to He creates from ordinary scenes, fleeting faces, and static objects valuable subjects and influential aesthetics in the shots. However, the problem of the real photographer is the presence of many tourists around him or curious passers-by who you find in the background of all the pictures, some of whom remain blurry in the lens of your camera, until that hidden amazement appears in the soul. This deserves the traditional caption under the picture: “A member of the tourist group or a passing passerby notices from afar.”
There are many like those who appear like blurs in the picture, and some of them are so light that you do not feel them, some of them you find competing with others to appear in the picture, and some of them look like a hunter who keeps disappearing until you press the “Shutter” of photography, and suddenly he appears to you like a rogue arrow. What is strange is that when we were young we used to work. Childish and annoying movements with which to annoy our friends. Then these movements disappeared from the backgrounds of photos since the 1980s, but now they have returned again with phone photography, as if they were part of a beloved fashion, especially signs of victory or love, or signs of childish behavior, or “C-jeez” or “Smile.” ..And tomorrow we will continue.
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