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PHOTOGRAPHER Shaikha Hanan bint Hassan Al Khalifa aims to inspire youngsters to pick up a camera by sharing her life behind the lens at an inaugural festival celebrating the images taken by some of the kingdom’s most talented snappers.
The president of Bahrain Photoclub is delighted to be helping to unveil the Bahrain Photographic Festival on Monday at Bahrain Financial Harbour.
The event will not only shed light on the club’s many achievements over the years such as winning the 2014 Turkish Gold and 2016 Korean successes at the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique (FIAP) awards, but it will also pave the way for young enthusiasts to enter the field of photography through various competitions and workshops.
Shaikha Hanan said: “Photography is precious to me. It captures a particular moment in time and for me, my pictures are my eyes. They mean so much to me. It’s what I see and want everyone-else to see.
“The Photoclub wants to raise awareness about the art of photography and how it should be treasured. We also want to encourage young people to join our club. We will have competitions, workshops and lectures as well.
“It can be a great hobby for some and a career for others. Personally, it was a wonderful way for me to tell my story and ever since picking up my first camera I never looked back.”
Photography came into her life when she was a child and wished she had been able to record a special moment and prove to friends that she had met and shaken hands with Egypt’s legendary Arabic singer, Abdel Halim Hafez.
When she told her school friends no one believed her. Shaikha Hanan explained: “I would say I did meet him, I really did … but no one would accept the fact.”
After doing well with her studies and moving to senior school her proud father offered to buy her a present and she asked for a video recorder.
“I was going to get my proof!” she said. “It was like the camera became a part of me and as a teenager I started walking around with it shooting everything in sight.
“My family soon realised how serious I was taking it and soon after we would gather around a projector and screen to watch whatever I had captured.
“I fell in love with cinematography and later still photographs.”
Although Shaikha Hanan studied political science and economy at Kuwait University. After graduating, she returned to the kingdom and took a job with the Ministry of Labour, before travelling to the US to study public administration at the University of Southern California, which is renowned for its film programme.
She said: “I became a member of its photography and film club. During my stay there, I started to lean more towards still photography, especially as movie cameras at the time were quite big and heavy to lug around.”
Shaikha Hanan purchased a Canon camera and started on another image collecting journey … this time around the globe. She said: “I went to Yemen in 1987 and I was fascinated by the country. At times the colour of the sky was purple and it was so beautiful. There was something magical about the place.
“I returned to Bahrain with great landscapes and scenery shots and created an exhibition with a friend called Essence of Countries. During that exhibition, I also showcased images taken in the Swiss city of Geneva and Japan’s Hiroshima, as well as those I had taken at home in Bahrain.
“To my surprise, the street and market shots full of people gained high praise. That’s when I realised that photographs with people in them have a certain soul.
“Perhaps in the past I had only concentrated on taking landscaped images because I was very shy. However, when I moved on to taking more portrait shots being behind the lens helped me conquer much of my shyness, although I still love taking landscapes and general street photography.”
Shaikha Hanan later became the first Arab female to visit Socotra, a small archipelago of four islands in the Arabian Sea and had long been a subdivision of the Aden Governorate. The island is very isolated and a third of its plant life is found nowhere else on the planet. It has been described as the most alien-looking place on earth.
“Being there was like ‘wow!’ she exclaimed. “Many people still lived in caves and you could not believe how primitive the conditions were.”
Publishing endeavours followed with images from her travels being snapped up by art lovers from the cherry blossoms of Japan to images featuring Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, and the US cities of San Francisco and New York.
Shaikha Hanan has also documented the old houses of Muharraq including the Abdullah Al Zayed House later restored by the Shaikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Centre for Culture and Research. The property honours the memory of the pioneering Bahraini journalist and publisher of the same name.
Solo photographic exhibitions featuring her work have been staged including one in the French capital of Paris in 2003 called Lumières de Bahrein. She also participated in the photography exhibitions with FIAP in 2004 in Hungary, in 2006 in China, in 2008 in Slovenia and in 2010 in Vietnam.
She also participated in 2014 in Turkey where Bahrain won the World Cup and in 2016 in South Korea winning the Seventh Honour Grade among the 10 best countries of the world.
Now all her energies are focused on the coming Photographic Festival in Bahrain with her colleagues from the club.
She said: “We are a group of people all joined by a love of photography. We have a lot of talented photographers, young and old, and we want to give them a chance to shine. I’m confident the event will prove inspirational to others and attract more young people into the world of images.”
