A vanishing way of life is captured

Noor Ali was the royal photographer but he also captured many of the simple, everyday scenes from the lives of ordinary people.

Courtesy of Noor Ali Rashid

This week's Time Frame is dedicated to Noor Ali Rashid, whose obituary appears below. He was the official royal photographer, the man who for more than half a century documented the lives of the rulers of the seven emirates and whose camera preserved for posterity many of the key moments in the life of the nation, both before and after the formation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. But Noor Ali also captured many of the simple, everyday scenes from the lives of ordinary people. These were lives that were disappearing rapidly as the country underwent seismic changes in the wake of the discovery of oil - and lives which, without Noor Ali's ever-present eye, would have been lost for ever. "If you don't take pictures," Noor Ali said last year, shortly before his 80th birthday, "how will you have memories?" One such memory was captured in this photograph of Al Ain market, taken by Noor Ali some time in the Sixties. Part of the collection he kept at his home in Sharjah, it evokes a tougher, already distant time, when men still carried weapons and wore bandoliers bristling with bullets as they went barefooted about their business in the years before the nation came of age.

Time Frame is a series that opens a window into the nation's past. Each week it features an image from the archives of both prominent institutions and private collections. Readers are also invited to make contributions and can submit ideas and photographs to [e-mail]