On a wintry family trip to Paris in 2008, the royal photographer Noor Ali Rashid suddenly turned to his daughter Shamsa with the words: “I think it's time for you to do my project.”
“What project?” Shamsa Noor Ali Rashid recalls replying, confused. “My project to preserve my work,” her father explained.
Just what a monumental task this would be may not have been obvious to his daughter at the time: preserving the photographic archive of the man who recorded most of the most important dates in UAE history over five decades.
Fourteen years after Noor Ali Rashid’s death in August 2010, the guardian of his legacy has finally completed the archiving and preservation of around 350,000 images, along with his cameras, light meters and other artefacts that tell his life story and that of the UAE.
Even that Herculean effort, though, only takes the Noor Ali Rashid Archives to the 1970s. The size of the collection of the country’s most famous photographer is truly staggering.
Archive available for all
His daughter recalled the first time she understood the scale of the task. By the end of his life, Noor Ali Rashid had several homes, including a villa, a penthouse and a three-bedroom apartment, as well as several storage areas. All were filled with photographs and negatives.
When she unlocked just one room, Shamsa said: “It was full from the ground up to the ceiling with boxes and photographs and more photographs. I looked at it and had this sinking feeling in my stomach: 'What have I taken on?'
“I went to my dad and I said ’I don't even know where to start. What do I do with all this?’ And he's like: 'Don't worry, you'll figure it out. It's not that difficult.' So then I started, and of course, I knuckled down,” she told The National.
The country has every reason to be grateful that she did. Her intention is that the archive will become available online as a resource for anyone interested in the history, culture and heritage of the UAE and her father’s role in recording it.
“My father photographed the story [of the UAE] because he wanted to share it,” she said. “As soon as we are ready we would like to provide it for the public to be able to use it for educational purposes, for the museums, for the institutions to be able to take advantage of it and learn from it.”
The archive is also a record of Noor Ali Rashid’s remarkable life. Born in 1929 in the port city of Gwadar, then an overseas possession of Oman but which transferred to Pakistan in 1958, he developed a passion for photography as a young adult.
Unhappy at this and hoping to push him towards a business career, his father dispatched him to Dubai to set up shop, thinking there would be nothing much to photograph there but desert. He could not have been more wrong.
Remarkable life
Arriving in Dubai in September 1958, he found the emirate was mourning the death of the ruler, Sheikh Saeed bin Maktoum Al Maktoum, with his son Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum succeeding. Noor Ali Rashid, who had hidden a camera in his luggage, was the only photographer on hand to capture this historic occasion.
“That really started his friendship with Sheikh Rashid and his career, because there weren't really that many people with cameras,” Shamsa said.
“And so Sheikh Rashid would start calling him whenever there was a dignitary in town, or whenever there was a special event. He was the first photojournalist of that region in the sense that he had the camera, and the British protectorate would often call him to take photographs and then send them to a newspaper in Bahrain.”
In 1962 he was invited to Abu Dhabi by Sheikh Zayed, then the Ruler’s Representative in Al Ain. “That was the first time Dad went to Abu Dhabi and took his portrait. And he just loved it. For some reason they just had an incredible, almost brotherly, fatherly relationship.”
“After that from the ‘60s all the way to the ‘70s, Dad built an amazing relationship with Sheikh Zayed. He accompanied Sheikh Zayed on personal trips where he was always photographing him. He would go on family events, he would go on hunting trips that the sheikh took. In fact, the first few years after the UAE was formed, he was present at almost all Sheikh Zayed’s official and personal foreign trips.”
Two events stand out from this time. In February 1968, Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid met in the desert to agree to the formation of the United Arab Emirates. Noor Ali Rashid was the only photographer present to capture the two leaders at this critical moment.
Then on December 2, 1971, he was invited to record the foundation of the country at what is now Union House in Dubai. Rashid’s iconic image captures Sheikh Zayed gazing at the new flag as it is about to be raised for the first time.
“He said Sheikh Zayed was so happy, and that you could feel this sense of pride, and this sense of aspiration that was in his eyes as he's raising the flag,” Shamsa said. “I think it was such a joyous occasion.”
Key relationships
Of his father’s relationship with the rulers, she said: “He wasn't a foreigner, he was just part of them. They enjoyed his company, he loved their company, he loved them. So I think that became his lifelong passion to photograph and to make sure that history was preserved. He was very loyal, and he wanted to show his loyalty through his work.”
Noor Ali Rashid’s body of work extended beyond those in power to more ordinary people and places. He once showed his daughter multiple photos taken over time of the Dubai Clock Tower. “I said: 'Dad, what possessed you to take all these photos?'
“And he said: ‘I knew things will change. So I had the camera, and I felt it was my responsibility to record it.’ He had basically taken photographs over years of that landmark, showing the development around it.
“That was his vision. He was a journalist. He enjoyed photography, and he really felt like this is something he wants to do, something that is his responsibility. So he did it with selflessness and just clicking away every day.”
He continued to take photos almost to the day he died. His prodigious output has produced nine books and a record of visiting world leaders that include Nelson Mandela, Anwar Sadat and Queen Elizabeth II.
Legacy of work
“The last photograph was with an instant camera that his grandson brought for him, because he could no longer carry heavy-duty cameras around his neck. He was playing with that, trying to learn how to use that camera and I think took one test shot,” Shansa said.
“On the day he passed away he was looking at his photographs, sorting things out, for about four or five hours, before he had a medical appointment. My mother told him: 'You need to leave.' And he said: 'Don't touch anything, leave it as is, because I'm working on it.' So he left, and that night he passed away.”
Shamsa, who now lives in Dubai, had forged her own highly successful career in IT in the United States, where she also created an investment fund for women entrepreneurs. The archives became her greatest and certainly most personal challenge.
After talking to everyone from museums to auction houses and consultants, she realised that she would just have to do it herself. With the help of her family and a small highly trained team she collected everything in one place and began to prioritise.
“We had 15 people working two shifts, just to clean the photographs and digitise them,” Shansa said. “We had seven scanners, 10 work stations. It was like an assembly line, it was a mammoth job. And I think we have preserved most of the historic work as well as the rest of it. The street photography, the portrait photography, the artistic photography, all of that has been preserved.”
After sorting, each photograph was cleaned with soft brushes, scanned and tagged using historical records and her father’s extensive notes. Negatives were even more challenging, protecting the delicate emulsions in acid-free sleeves and temperature-controlled storage. The cost, Shamsa estimates, has been “millions”.
For the moment the work has paused to assess what remains and what it will cost to complete. But Shamsa is determined to finish the archive, to honour the promise she made to her father. “That was the last thing I talked to him about,” she said. “It wasn't just a project, it was a promise that needed to be delivered.”
