“I liked these boats lying there forgotten, close to the desert. It reminded me of how Qatar is made of the sea and of the desert.”
intriguing answer: “It’s the freedom of the medium and its capacity to create timeless images where past and present overlap each other.” A native of Lebanon, Attar has resided in France since 1990 and has more recently been living in Doha, where apart from serving as the director of the photo library of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, he has been capturing the ever-changing landscape of Qatar and its people on film. Some of the resulting photographs have been shown in a book followed by an exhibition called ‘DOHArama’. Since Attar feels he is living a cultural revolution in Qatar, he wanted to document his journey in the
country: “With Lomography I found the way of transmitting my idea of Qatar,” he says. “Lomo photography allowed me to create a sort of ‘fake past’ in the images. You photograph something modern but it looks like it’s history.” Attar describes it as a risky and “intellectual” type of photography. Part of the charm – or despair – of shooting Lomo photos is that the film needs to be sent away, in this case to Paris, to be developed. “You forget what you did, and then you discover it again,” says Attar. At times the result is a set of overexposed or underexposed images that cannot be used. But sometimes, as is shown in Attar’s Lomo photographs of Qatar, the result is art.p
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