Muscat – University of Technology and Applied Sciences (UTAS) in Muscat will host a photography exhibition on Sunday, May 5, to highlight Omani talent and promote tourism.

The two-week exhibition, titled ‘Hess’ – or ‘Feeling’ – will be held at Bait al Zubair Museum, showcasing 70 images by 21 photographers. The event aims to capture the beauty of Oman, boost tourism and celebrate local artistic talent.

Photographer Mohammed Sulaiman Nasser al Shaaili, who is overseeing the exhibition, said, “Photography serves as a medium for conveying emotions and artistic sentiments in society.”

He stressed the need to support Omani photographers by creating environments conducive to artistic expression and offering platforms to showcase their work. He also highlighted the sultanate’s achievements in photography, noting that many Omani photographers have earned prestigious accolades.

“The exhibition seeks to not only celebrate Omani talent in photography but also to underscore its role in promoting cultural exchange and tourism, both domestically and internationally.”

Creative Industries Forum

In addition to the exhibition, an event called Creative Industries Forum will be held on May 5 to 6 at Bait al Zubair Museum. The forum aims to highlight the significance of creative industries in fostering sustainable economic development and cultural innovation. It will also spotlight UTAS’s programmes in photography, design, journalism, digital media and advertising.

The forum’s primary goal is to equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the global knowledge economy, which increasingly relies on creativity. It will include dialogue sessions with industry professionals, focusing on the role of creative industries in economic development and the impact of educational programmes on the creative economy and sustainable development.

Additionally, the forum will feature a workshop showcasing success stories of university graduates and entrepreneurs in the creative industries, aiming to inspire students towards continuous learning and self-development.

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• The German snapper is showcasing the exhibit – called The Provocateur – at the Staley-Wise Gallery in NYC
• The sultry images, most of which have ‘never been seen before,’ were taken across her decades-long career 
• Zoë Kravitz, Linda Evangelista, Elle Macpherson and Cara Delevingne are also all included in the snaps

By Lillian Gissen For Dailymail.Com

Published: 11:56 EDT, 4 May 2024 | Updated: 11:56 EDT, 4 May 2024

Acclaimed photographer Ellen von Unwerth has unveiled a new exhibit that features extremely provocative photographs of stars such as Rihanna, Kate Moss, and Demi Moore posing nearly nude.

The German snapper – who has shot for magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Playboy, I-D and The Face among others over the years – is showcasing the collection, called The Provocateur, at the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York City.

The sultry images, most of which have ‘never been seen before,’ were taken across her decades-long career and showcase a slew of famous faces flaunting their stunning figures.

One picture, which was taken in 2014, shows Rihanna standing topless in only white briefs while in the shower.

The singer, 36, is holding her undies open and spraying water onto the lower part of her body while covering her chest with her arm.

Another, shot in 1995, features Kate, 50, staring seductively at the camera with no shirt on.

She has a towel wrapped around her waist and her hands placed on her breasts for modesty.

A third snap, which was from 2004, sees model Elle Macpherson sitting on the toilet in nothing but her birthday suit.

The now-60-year-old model’s mouth is open wide with shock and she’s holding a roll of toilet paper over her chest. 

Another picture shows actress Demi, 61, lounging on a couch in lingerie and fishnet tights as a man places a mask onto her face in a snap that was taken in 1996.

And one from 2005 features Catwoman alum Zoë Kravitz leaning over a bowl in a black mask.

Other stars featured in the seductive gallery includes David Bowie, Karl Lagerfeld, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Cara Delevingne.

‘The photographs reflect a liberated and irrepressible engagement with her subjects that the photographer has championed for her entire career,’ reads a description.

‘These exhibition images reflect a winking provocateur. Not so much the object of lust but the playful instigator – both innocent and naughty. 

‘While eroticism is in the forefront of many of these images, fantasy and humor unite von Unwerth’s vision of her subjects simply having fun – with each other, and with the viewer who they tease, taunt, and provoke.’

Other snaps show various models dancing on a table in the nude and lifting up their tops to flaunt their breasts.

In a different photo, one woman is seen pulling another’s skirt up to show off her thong underneath.

Another shows Christy and Linda laying on lounge chairs in Cannes back in 1990 with their legs intertwined.

And one image sees two Playboy bunnies looking into a mirror and fixing up their makeup, with their behinds front and center. 

‘I know what it’s like when you feel really uncomfortable, so I do everything in my power to make them feel at ease – and to live and laugh and move,’ Ellen said of the exhibit.

Ellen started her career off as a model after she was scouted at age 20 while walking down the street in Germany.

She then switched her focus to photography after a booming seven-year modeling career.

In 1989, she was propelled into the spotlight after she took snaps of a young Claudia Schiffler. 

On top of fashion photoshoots and magazine covers, she’s also shot a bunch of album covers for artists like Christina Aguilera, Dido, Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Janet Jackson. 

Inas Abu Maamar wears a plain blue garment and a mustard brown headscarf decorated with a pattern of raised knots. Her arms cradle the shroud covering a small, slumping body, nestled on her lap. Her head and face are bowed into the crook of her left arm. It is as though Abu Maamar is willing the body of her five-year-old niece, Saly, back to life, so that she would be able to sit one more time on her aunt’s lap.

The only visible identifier in this photograph is Abu Maamar’s left hand. Though she has not even reached middle age, the skin on her fingers and the back of her hand is already a little rough. I imagine that her hands have scrubbed pots, kneaded daily bread, come too close to the walls of a scorching hot oven. It is a hand that has been singed by hardship and history. It enfolds her niece’s face, fingers splayed and searching, as if attempting to read her beloved’s features in the dark.

The photograph, taken by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem on October 17, 2023, was recently awarded the prestigious World Press Photo of the Year by World Press Photo Foundation (WPP), an independent, non-profit organisation based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The jury noted that Salem’s 2024 winning image – which was given the title, “A Palestinian Woman Embraces the Body of Her Niece” – was “composed with care and respect, offering at once a metaphorical and literal glimpse into unimaginable loss”.

Salem took the photograph at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. There, he found families had gathered to search for the bodies of loved ones killed in Israeli bombardment on civilian homes, as families have done since Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza on October 7.

Salem’s photograph emerges from a vast number of images and thousands of minutes of video that Palestinians have been disseminating through social media platforms over the past six months, documenting their own genocide. It has become one of the most well-recognised, much-shared images of the genocide – one of those “iconic” images of war, surfacing again and again on newsreels and social media posts.

Why did this particular photograph of a mourning woman and lifeless child captivate audiences around the world? What drew the members of WPP’s jury to this photograph – rather than other photographs that Salem took of the same woman mourning the deceased child?

Cropping out context

Prestigious awards for photography and the juries that determine what is worthy of exceptional praise tend to favour images that hint at layered, if limited in what layers are permitted, narratives, allowing viewers to engage with just enough complexity. Juries often reward images that provide easy entry for those perceived to be the dominant group of viewers.

In another photograph that Salem took of Abu Maamar, in which her face is visible, her mouth is open in a naked expression of distress. This image gives her an individual identity; her grief is a screaming, uncontainable horror.

A plastic chair can be seen to the left of her, white body bags piled up on it. The leg and shoe of a man wearing all blue – a medical professional, perhaps – stands to the far side, the unidentified witness to her grief, perhaps to thousands of such griefs.

The body bags would have alluded to genocide. Audiences would not be able to reduce the narrative to a singular loss, to an isolated, ahistorical moment of Orientalised grieving.

But in this “winning” frame, Abu Maamar’s face cannot be seen, her personhood is subsumed, passive, and accepting of divine dictates. Her emotions would be too powerful, her grief too inelegant in its lack of containment, should they be seen by the public.

As long as the suffering is tidy, and coded through Western art historical references to innumerable paintings and sculpture of Mary grieving the death of her son, Jesus, viewers may project a range of narratives onto the woman. This way of framing her does not provoke fear of an other’s rage – it is not an unwordable, uncontained, roaring suffering. Rather, it is a safe, consumable display of grief and suffering.

WPP’s selection for World Press Photo of the Year was cropped to remove any contextual material that surrounds Abu Maamar and her niece. The photograph is also cropped, in more metaphorical terms, of the conditions and history that led to this specific child’s death and this living relative’s unbearable suffering. The materiality of that history – and the millions displaced and starving under siege, the tens of thousands dead and the many under bombed buildings without even the dignity of being shrouded and buried – is strategically made absent.

Such cropping reinforces the reproduction of a particular type of liberal politics, and a specific methodology of framing “conflict” essential to liberal ways of grieving. It allows one to continue to insist on “both sides” of the argument, and situate oneself in a location where it is possible to mourn and – unconsciously, perhaps – celebrate one’s ability to feel sympathy, without having to truly recognise the genocidal horror playing out in real-time. To recognise it would mean that one would be forced to act.

Cropped images aid the continuation of cropped politics. This dynamic is especially evident in the power imbalance between an army supported by the US and equipped with billions worth of weaponry and armed groups without such support; “those without” are people that the geopolitical West regards as an “Oriental other”.

Demanding the elimination of context has been essential to Israel’s justification of genocide in Gaza. Excising the context – including any reference to 75 years of dispossession, occupation, imprisonment without trial, torture, daily brutality, and slow genocide – has, in turn, shaped the narrative.

That has been apparent in US media across print, TV and radio. Mainstream media outlets announce, repetitively, at the beginning or end of reports, that “Israel began its bombardment of [Gaza] in response to the attack by the militant group Hamas on October 7.” It is as though Israel’s violent exercise of power began on October 7, and only because of a provocation by a Palestinian party.

Gaza photographers as ‘Hamas sympathisers’

Asim Rafiqui, a photographer and photography scholar, told me in an interview, that one of the main reasons that this image – “out of a mountain of photographs” – was deemed worthy of an award, is that “winners” must silence far more than they reveal. A winner must be “a cleansed, commodified, social media appropriate image, evaluated and filtered for ‘sensitive content’ as we’ve become so accustomed to seeing.”

A photo editor with a prominent news agency who wishes to remain anonymous also reminded me that Israel’s foreign ministry used scare tactics to discredit Palestinian photojournalists as Hamas sympathisers and collaborators.

After Yousef Masoud, another Palestinian photojournalist based in Gaza, won an award in February, the spokesperson for the Consulate General of Israel in New York claimed, in a letter, that he had “links” to Hamas and had prior knowledge of the October 7 attack, which “mortally compromise[ed] the integrity of his reporting”.

Masoud was one of several photojournalists whose images of the attack were, according to Israeli claims, used by the AP, Reuters, The New York Times and CNN.

However, the photo editor told me this was a “cheap tactic by Israeli forces to delegitimise [the journalists’] work”; after all, “photojournalists went alongside the [Israeli military], using their cameras to produce ‘poetic’ black and white photographs in the aftermath of destruction.”

And photojournalists infamously embedded with the US army, as it invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, producing images that celebrated and legitimised the brutal actions of armies and contractors hired by participating states.

The photo editor also pointed out that when a photographer is a white European like Italian Massimo Berruti, who lived long term in Pakistan’s Swat valley, embedded with Lashkars – a civilian militia, not an army associated with a state – they are praised. But Gaza’s photojournalists who are just as daring and committed to producing documentary visuals are seen as “Hamas sympathisers”.

The pressure that Israel applied had immediate effect. Rafiqui states that wire services like the AP and Reuters, as well as other global news outlets that uphold and reproduce the power structures of the geopolitical West quickly made the decision to work only with those who have been incorporated by corporate media, “thereby garlanding authority and credibility” solely to themselves as dependable sources of news.

While “the visual archive was being produced in real-time by the people of Gaza, their witnessing was refused [by Western corporate media] … effectively erasing and discrediting all Gazans who are independently documenting what is happening to them,” Rafiqui said.

Awarding consumable images

To state what should be obvious: the visual narratives that make up what we imagine to be “the news” – supposedly impartial, balanced, and accurate – are created through processes that reflect existing power structures, which benefit from history being portrayed in favour of those in power.

Prestigious awards such as World Press Photo, which elevate certain images above others, instruct generations of photographers from around the world. Photographers, photo editors, and jurists of photography awards bring with them their moral views, ties to powerful people in the industry, and structures that support their ecosystem – other photo editors, photojournalists, donors, and ever-shrinking global media houses owned by a handful of powerful owners. Some may be consciously critical of the origins of their viewpoints; others not so much.

Awards are thus structured in ways that favour easily commodifiable images. “Winners” need to be consumed; and to be consumed easily, they must allow for metaphorical interpretations, so that a broad range of meanings may be thrown at the surface, and stick.

To be consumed easily, winners cannot include too much dangerous, difficult-to-digest context. That would only alienate audiences. Better to stick with a woman whose face and visceral, raging grief is contained within “safe” Orientalist tropes that only signal to many in the geopolitical West her supposed oppression under her own culture.

It is important to recognise that the reinforcement of well-known tropes of Orientalist ways of looking, seeing, and reading do not arise, in this case, from the photographer’s callousness or lack of embeddedness within the community that they are documenting.

Salem is from Gaza, and clearly working under horrific, dangerous conditions. There is no need to undermine his work. Some may criticise Salem for photographing a grieving woman at one of the most vulnerable moments in her life. Such photographs usually evidence vast imbalances in power. It brings about attendant questions about why anyone should have the right to photograph a person without their consent, if consent is even possible at such a moment.

Shielding one’s face is a sign that a person is attempting to maintain some privacy and agency, even as the camera intrudes. But in this case, she may not be “hiding” her face solely to shield herself from the camera in front of her; rather, it is one of many of the ways in which Abu Maamar arranges and rearranges herself in grief.

Salem’s response to the recognition by WPP is telling. According to Reuters Global Editor for Pictures and Video, Rickey Rogers, the photographer reportedly “received the news of his WPP award with humility, saying that this is not a photo to celebrate but that he appreciates its recognition and the opportunity to publish it to a wider audience.”

It is an arresting image. Mohammed Salem is more than deserving of the recognition that an award from WPP brings. But asking the question, “Why this photograph, among the millions of others?” reveals a far more uncomfortable set of truths about the ecosystem that rewards and elevates decontextualised, ahistorical images.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Ting Ting Chen, a visual artist who has attracted international attention for her highly detailed photographs, has teamed up again with an unlikely muse who has had a large impact on her work. 

Chen, who grew up in China, came to Newfoundand originally as a student, and since then has been developing her artistic career. 

Chen and Robert Tilley, 76, met through a mutual friend in 2017. The pair have travelled around the province together since then.

“We have been almost everywhere in Newfoundland, from the east to the west from the north to south,” said Chen. 

“We have an emotional connection because we’re good friends in in our life.” 

Her latest exhibition, Unveiled Visions: Narratives in Time, opened recently at the Emma Butler Gallery. 

On their travels, Chen discovered her passion for photography. Now, Chen is an award-winning artist and is recognized around the world.

A muse and a friend

Chen’s exhibit features two artworks featuring Tilley, titled Mr. Sweet and The View. 

Mr. Sweet is a photograph of Tilley enjoying a colourful lollipop. 

The inspiration for the piece was Tilley’s childhood tale of going on a walk to Bowring Park with a friend. Along the way, they ate an entire bag of Hershey Bells, but when they arrived at the park, they were too sick and had to return home. 

“Robert really likes to eat sweets in his daily life,” said Chen. 

The View features Tilley sitting in a chair in his family home in Brigus, staring out the window at the landscape. 

Of the old coveralls that Tilley wears in the photo, he said, “I prefer to wear them till they’re rags — that’s just my sort of personality.” 

As for his role in providing inspiration to an artist, he said, “I think being a muse is like being a friend.” 

A unique perspective

Chen also wanted to try capturing herself after taking photos of Tilley. Her first self-portrait is on display at the gallery, called Vessel for Time. 

WATCH | Ting Ting Chen talks about her new exhibit:

The connection between artist Ting Ting Chen and the person who most influences her work

22 hours ago

Duration 2:25

She’s won awards the world over, but it’s Ting Ting Chen’s connection to Newfoundland and Labrador that has had the greatest impact on her work. She met Robert Tilley, 76, seven years ago and considers him her muse. He’s featured in her new exhibit, titled Unveiled Visions: Narratives in Time, at the Emma Butler Gallery. The CBC’s Gavin Simms and video producer Danny Arsenault recently spoke with Chen.

The photo features her long hair, which she has not cut since 2012. She named the piece because her body and hair are the result of the past 12 years of her life. 

“Our body is a testament of the times that we have been experiencing” she said.

Chen said that many people think her photos are paintings when they first see them. She says this is because of her unique retouching process, through which she tries to make the photos look like paintings.

“I’m very grateful that I’ve come to Newfoundland and I found all these new opportunities for me to do some self-discovery,” said Chen. 

Chen also published a book of her photos titled Impressions of Newfoundland: The Art of Ting Ting Chen with Breakwater Books in 2023, which has been short-listed for the 2023 Foreword Indies Book Awards. 

Chen accredits her success to the people in Newfoundland who have supported her along the way.

“Without these nice people who gave me opportunities I wouldn’t have been able to make it this far,” she said. “So I’m really lucky.” 

Chen has ambitions of exploring more parts of Newfoundland and taking more portraits of Tilley in the future.

The exhibit is open until May 18. 

Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click here to visit our landing page.

Posted: 4th May, 2024 by The Editor

Royel Otis have carved their way into the indie-pop/rock scene since their debut. The Australian act have hit the ground running, touring across the world. It’s really impressive to see this group just go for it, and for their music to be celebrated and appreciated. With support from Girl and Girl, their show in Philly was a nice night of chill vibes. Jay took some amazing photos, check them out!

Photos by Jay Leiby

The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch.

The 300SL, a revered classic and arguably the quintessential Mercedes that resonates with fans far beyond the brand’s devout followers. Imagine my thrill when I had the chance to photograph this iconic car at Budapest’s renowned Heroes Square. Join me on this brief, almost utopian adventure.

Meet Zoli, affectionately known as “Gullwing Zoli” in our circles. Known on Instagram as classic.race, Zoli resides in Germany. He’s not only a wonderful person with a generous heart but also possesses profound knowledge and experience with classic cars. He works with HK Engineering’s Race division, where he builds, maintains, and manages rentals for their race cars.

One of Hungary’s largest car shows, AMTS, was Zoli’s chosen venue to showcase the Race SL300. We occasionally chat, so I learned about his plans quite early and couldn’t resist saying, “Sorry, but it would be foolish to miss this chance to showcase that this car has visited Budapest.” It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thankfully, Zoli, true to his kind nature, agreed. Despite little sleep and a long drive back to Germany looming, he met me and my camera at dusk at the majestic Heroes Square.

I’ll let the photographs tell the rest of the story. Enjoy!

Photos: Peter Mosoni