New photography project portrays decades of regular family life in UAE


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In a garden shed in Brighton in the UK, Alex Atack found an unexpected history of the UAE – shelf upon shelf of his family’s leather-bound photo albums.

Stuck on to pages preserved by cellophane and packed into boxes were photographs of his parents' life in the Emirates, from 1983 until their departure last year, covering much of the country's modern history.

Last Christmas, his mother pulled out old family albums and Atack was struck by parallels with personal photographs he had taken as a photojournalist in the UAE two and three decades later. Laying out prints side by side, he found he had unconsciously photographed childhood haunts: Safa Park and The Hard Rock Cafe in Dubai; Sandy Beach in Fujairah; a buffet on a dhow. It was a serendipitous time-lapse. Atack began to pair parallel photos in a project he titled Unsentimental City.

Sheikh Zayed Road, 1985. Alex Atack
Sheikh Zayed Road, 1985. Alex Atack

“Maybe stories about Dubai get told in one of two ways, which is the seedy underbelly of Dubai, or the Ferraris and the seven-star hotels,” says Atack. “There’s never [stories about] any normal people who lived there for 30 years and who gave most of their lives to this place and made all of their memories there and made their home there and brought their kids up there. It’s never really portrayed as this kind of place, right?

“There is such a broad spectrum of people who have spent their lives in the UAE, and I feel it’s important to tell more stories about that. I think Dubai is still associated with luxury and glamour and money. That exists, but I don’t think it’s the reality for most people.”

Atack's father arrived from a small mining town in the north of England in 1983, only 12 years after the UAE's formation, when Dubai was positioning itself as the region's transport hub. He managed freight at Dubai Airport, which had a single runaway. The job was considered a hardship posting. His mother was a flight attendant for British Airways.

Alex Atack’s mother, Dawn, on a British Airways flight. Alex Atack
Alex Atack’s mother, Dawn, on a British Airways flight. Alex Atack

“If you worked in aviation in Dubai in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a huge circle of people and they met through friends. My mum would come into Dubai on trips every month or every two months.” After three years of long distance, she moved to the UAE and Alex was born in 1993.

The Unsentimental City project takes its name from the words of Atack's friend Maysam, who is Syrian, born and bred in the Emirates. Atack interviewed him for a podcast about Maysam's relationship to a country that would never be recognised as his own. His talk of the jarring disappearance of childhood spaces resonated with Atack, whose childhood home was in Satwa.

“He’s like: ‘You know, I drive down a road I have driven down all my life, and I don’t go there for a month and then I’m lost. It’s not a sentimental city. It doesn’t have to be because it’s got its progress and it thrives on transience. That’s always how Dubai has existed.’

A photo of a beach in Dubai from Alex Atack's family photo album. Alex Atack
A photo of a beach in Dubai from Alex Atack's family photo album. Alex Atack

“I thought it was kind of true,” says Atack. “All of these places that I have fond memories of don’t really need to exist for Dubai to thrive. I guess Dubai has never really been a city that clings on to its modern history. Once things have run their course they kind of just go, but I think there’s something important about keeping them.

"It's these unintentional things that make a city, the urban planning coincidences that build up this sense of urban memory."

Photographer Alex Atack. Adib Chowdhury
Photographer Alex Atack. Adib Chowdhury

Atack's project is part of a growing number of family photography collections, such as Darah Ghanem's Middle East Archive and Ayesha Saldanha's Gulf—South Asia. Family photographs put history within reach, says Jasmine Soliman, an archivist at the Akkasah Centre for Photography at New York University Abu Dhabi.

“They communicate in a way that is universal. We can all go through our parents’ photos and find a photo of their first house or just after the birth of their first child. Everybody takes the same photographs, but they also reveal our differences. What were people wearing? What did the room look like? How many children were there? What were the parties like? There is so much contained within. Family photographs reveal societal change and the intangible intricacies of family life.”

Alex Atack and his mother, Dawn, in Safa Park around 1994. Courtesy Alex Atack
Alex Atack and his mother, Dawn, in Safa Park around 1994. Courtesy Alex Atack

Community-driven projects such as Atack's can be forerunners for institutional archives and spark personal interest in family albums. Recent history can often be most effective at stirring interest in the past, says Soliman. "I hope that the project acts as inspiration for others to recognise that their own histories, and that of their families, are important to document and preserve."

Such collections broaden a national history usually defined in economic terms. "I think Alex's work answers to this idea that the UAE was an economy built on oil with the super-rich or the labourers and nothing in between," says Mohamed Somji, director of Gulf Photo Plus photography centre in Dubai.

Safa Park, Dubai 2015. Alex Atack
Safa Park, Dubai 2015. Alex Atack

"The idea that there are people going out with their families is largely kept out of the narrative. Alex's albums are very much part of this invisible layer of life in Dubai that doesn't get spoken about. People's lives are being built here and we're more than a transitional stop in a blingy place."

Unsentimental City stretches the idea of who counts as local. Multi-generational stories of immigration are being woven into the discourse as children raised in the UAE grow up and add to the national narrative.

Atack has contributed to this through his work as a photojournalist in Dubai and Beirut, and as a founding producer for the Middle East podcast Kerning Cultures. "It's only in recent years I've tried to unlearn everything I learnt in photojournalism school and look at how else I can construct narratives," says Atack.

"When you study photojournalism at school and you study the greats – Robert Capa, James Nachtwey – you feel if you want to be successful in documentary photography, you have to fit this mould doing stories covering war, famine, the misfortunes of the world. There are a lot of up-and-coming photographers, particularly women, who are breaking that and realising the photojournalism industry is outdated and there needs to be a broader range of photographer that is considered documentary."

The ongoing Unsentimental City project has changed Atack's relationship to the UAE. "I always thought of the UK as the place that defined me above anywhere else, but doing this project and going through my own photo archives and my parents' archives, I really realised how much of my history and my family's history is tied up in this place," says Atack.

“And the way it’s tied up in it isn’t in a way that we could ever consider ourselves local, but we fit this niche of long-term expatriates, or long-term I-don’t-know-what-you’d-call-it. I never really gave the UAE credit for being such a big part of my life.”

More information on the Unsentimental City project is available at alexatack.com

Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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UK-EU trade at a glance

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Co-operation on security initiatives and procurement of defence products

Youth experience scheme to work, study or volunteer in UK and EU countries

Smoother border management with use of e-gates

Cutting red tape on import and export of food

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Ahmed Raza (captain), Chirag Suri (vice-captain), Rohan Mustafa, Mohammed Usman, Mohammed Boota, Zahoor Khan, Junaid Siddique, Waheed Ahmad, Zawar Farid, CP Rizwaan, Aryan Lakra, Karthik Meiyappan, Alishan Sharafu, Basil Hameed, Kashif Daud, Adithya Shetty, Vriitya Aravind

What is safeguarding?

“Safeguarding, not just in sport, but in all walks of life, is making sure that policies are put in place that make sure your child is safe; when they attend a football club, a tennis club, that there are welfare officers at clubs who are qualified to a standard to make sure your child is safe in that environment,” Derek Bell explains.

Dubai works towards better air quality by 2021

Dubai is on a mission to record good air quality for 90 per cent of the year – up from 86 per cent annually today – by 2021.

The municipality plans to have seven mobile air-monitoring stations by 2020 to capture more accurate data in hourly and daily trends of pollution.

These will be on the Palm Jumeirah, Al Qusais, Muhaisnah, Rashidiyah, Al Wasl, Al Quoz and Dubai Investment Park.

“It will allow real-time responding for emergency cases,” said Khaldoon Al Daraji, first environment safety officer at the municipality.

“We’re in a good position except for the cases that are out of our hands, such as sandstorms.

“Sandstorms are our main concern because the UAE is just a receiver.

“The hotspots are Iran, Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, but we’re working hard with the region to reduce the cycle of sandstorm generation.”

Mr Al Daraji said monitoring as it stood covered 47 per cent of Dubai.

There are 12 fixed stations in the emirate, but Dubai also receives information from monitors belonging to other entities.

“There are 25 stations in total,” Mr Al Daraji said.

“We added new technology and equipment used for the first time for the detection of heavy metals.

“A hundred parameters can be detected but we want to expand it to make sure that the data captured can allow a baseline study in some areas to ensure they are well positioned.”

The BIO

Favourite piece of music: Verdi’s Requiem. It’s awe-inspiring.

Biggest inspiration: My father, as I grew up in a house where music was constantly played on a wind-up gramophone. I had amazing music teachers in primary and secondary school who inspired me to take my music further. They encouraged me to take up music as a profession and I follow in their footsteps, encouraging others to do the same.

Favourite book: Ian McEwan’s Atonement – the ending alone knocked me for six.

Favourite holiday destination: Italy - music and opera is so much part of the life there. I love it.

ELIO

Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett

Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina

Rating: 4/5

La Mer lowdown

La Mer beach is open from 10am until midnight, daily, and is located in Jumeirah 1, well after Kite Beach. Some restaurants, like Cupagahwa, are open from 8am for breakfast; most others start at noon. At the time of writing, we noticed that signs for Vicolo, an Italian eatery, and Kaftan, a Turkish restaurant, indicated that these two restaurants will be open soon, most likely this month. Parking is available, as well as a Dh100 all-day valet option or a Dh50 valet service if you’re just stopping by for a few hours.
 

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The biog

Birthday: February 22, 1956

Born: Madahha near Chittagong, Bangladesh

Arrived in UAE: 1978

Exercise: At least one hour a day on the Corniche, from 5.30-6am and 7pm to 8pm.

Favourite place in Abu Dhabi? “Everywhere. Wherever you go, you can relax.”

Key facilities
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  • Premier League-standard football pitch
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  • NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
  • 600-seat auditorium
  • Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
  • An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
  • Specialist robotics and science laboratories
  • AR and VR-enabled learning centres
  • Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
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UAE group fixtures (all in St Kitts)

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  • Thursday 20 January: v England 
  • Saturday 22 January: v Bangladesh 

UAE squad:

Alishan Sharafu (captain), Shival Bawa, Jash Giyanani, Sailles
Jaishankar, Nilansh Keswani, Aayan Khan, Punya Mehra, Ali Naseer, Ronak Panoly,
Dhruv Parashar, Vinayak Raghavan, Soorya Sathish, Aryansh Sharma, Adithya
Shetty, Kai Smith  

GAC GS8 Specs

Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo

Power: 248hp at 5,200rpm

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Transmission: 8-speed auto

Fuel consumption: 9.1L/100km

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Company profile

Name: Steppi

Founders: Joe Franklin and Milos Savic

Launched: February 2020

Size: 10,000 users by the end of July and a goal of 200,000 users by the end of the year

Employees: Five

Based: Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

Financing stage: Two seed rounds – the first sourced from angel investors and the founders' personal savings

Second round raised Dh720,000 from silent investors in June this year

FIXTURES

All games 6pm UAE on Sunday: 
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HOW DO SIM CARD SCAMS WORK?

Sim swap frauds are a form of identity theft.

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MATCH INFO

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Raheem Sterling 35', 49'

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Sterling (14'), Bernardo Silva (64')

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RESULTS

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Vinicius de Oliveira (BRA) beat Furkatbek Yokubov (RUS)

(Round 1 TKO)

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Movlid Khaybulaev (RUS) v Zaka Fatullazade (AZE)

(Round 1 rear naked choke)

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Shannon Ross (TUR) beat Donovon Freelow (USA)

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Dan Collins (GBR) beat Mohammad Yahya (UAE)

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Catchweight 73kg

Martun Mezhulmyan (ARM) beat Islam Mamedov (RUS)

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Bantamweight world title

Xavier Alaoui (MAR) beat Jaures Dea (CAM)

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Manon Fiorot (FRA) v Gabriela Campo (ARG)

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