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Rambling and shooting through Bahrain

Amongst other things: why photography is metaphor.
Written and photographed by Pinaki

The kingdom looked theatrically black and white even before I touched down with my cameras. We were 26,000ft and descending fast. While Oman roasted in pre-summer heat, Bahrain was struck by lighting and washed over with rain. It didn’t look pretty from the air. Under me, wing lights bounced off rain and cloud, reflecting dully back at us. Minutes later, as we cleared the clouds and lined up shakily for the runway, the lights of the city jerked wildly across the window, appearing and then disappearing with each shudder.

I’m not exaggerating. The next few minutes were like a badly made Hollywood movie. As the plane was slapped in the side by the wind, and then jerked back by the pilot, we seemed to hit the runway at an angle, on one set of wheels. Someone screamed, and I would have done too if I could. Instead, I gulped in the dark and dug my nails deep into the economy-class upholstery. No one noticed.

I was in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, to record my impressions of the Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2007, and any fleeting glimpses I might have of daily life around me in the city. There are two things you need to shoot little cars that travel at 300km an hour. Firstly, access, which means you can stick your lens between the slats in the fence hopping-distance away from the blur of carbon fibre, instead of gazing wishfully from a regular viewing seat. Secondly, a great big mammoth of a lens that could pick a tick off a rhino’s nostril while still keeping you safely at a distance – or in this case, letting you focus in close to the cars. The third thing (which they don’t tell you about) is earplugs that let you survive the unbearable roar of the fastest cars in the world revving by at 9,000rpm.

Back in the good old days, things were more mechanical than electronic, meaning you had to twist your lens to focus it, peer deeply into your viewfinder and figure out if the subject was in focus or not. Now try to do that with a man running. Photographers in those days used to employ a technique called pre-focusing when covering sports, where they would have already focused their cameras on a point on the track, for example, and click the shutter when the runner had reached that spot. Luckily, autofocus systems have developed as well as Formula One cars. All we have to do is click.

Or so I thought. Normally, you would half-click the shutter button to focus, and then depress it fully to actually shoot. Now, though, the blur of red that I presumed was a Ferrari had probably done an eight around Manama in the time it took to move from half click to full. Nice try, but all I got was empty tarmac.

Desperate, I tried pre-focusing. Of course, since I was born after autofocus (AF, which comes after AD, which came after BC) I still half-clicked weakly on the track. I waited till a car came into the viewfinder and then clicked, shooting blank air, because apparently my visual-motor coordination (I always though this was a woman driver problem) is slower than a Grand Prix vehicle: if you see it in your camera and then click, it has moved out of your viewfinder by the time you have clicked.

This was getting better and better. I was in the Gulf Air Paddock Club, sitting in air-conditioned comfort, sipping on a chilled white, nibbling on ravioli and the occasional asparagus, in front of a glass window overlooking the start/finish line, about ten feet above the Ferrari pitstop. Men have committed crimes for lesser privileges. But I was not getting any photographs.

That brings us to another problem of photography, which separates the amateur from the professional. Most people walk into the Paddock Club and think they’ll get the photograph of a lifetime. A professional walks in and sees all the problems: the spots of dried rain on the outside of the glass wall that no one cleaned, stains that the camera will invariably focus on instead of the action beyond, the reflections and glare on the surface, the fact that you are parallel to the track, which means you will only get a flat side of each car. More importantly, being parallel to the track means that the car is moving at its fastest across your viewfinder, as opposed to if it were coming towards you, where you’d have it in the frame a much longer time. Then there was the roof, which was not concrete, but a sort of synthetic flowing tent top, allowing diffused natural light in – charming to some but unbearable to a photographer, because it bounced off the glass and into the camera, adding to the glare from the sun that was low and in our eyes. This is the real world of photography, where details drive you crazy most of the time. Sometimes, fleetingly, magic will happen. The ray of light will come through, the girl will lift her eyes, the wind will ruffle the horse’s mane, or Lewis Hamilton will walk past you, a couple of hours before stunning the world and finishing second.

No one knew who the kid in the white t-shirt and cap was, of course. Hamilton was an unknown, a 1985-born boy from England, who would be a hero later that afternoon. His life would change for ever, for this novice now has the distinction of finishing on the podium of each Grand Prix he has raced in – all three of them. As he strolled past us, though, he seemed like a young, clean-shaven fan. Then a little camera flash popped, and another, and everyone was asking who he was. I walked over, raised a big heavy lens meant for the cars, and shot three times in rapid succession before a crowd closed in. There’s nothing like getting lucky in photography, and, more importantly, being prepared for the moment when you do get that chance.

I hadn’t had time to do much, but this much I did do: I opened the lens wide, up to f/2.8, so it was allowing as much light as possible to get in, which meant that I could shoot it at the fastest fraction of a second. This in turn meant that there would be no visible hand-shake, and for technical reasons too deep to go into here, that the background would blur nicely, making Hamilton’s face pop out. A telephoto lens also meant that I could avoid getting a lot of the surrounding people into the shot. As they closed in, I let a bit of a person get in – it added to the depth and dynamics of the composition. The last shot had it all: the moment when he is beginning to smile sideways at someone, about to flick his head back; the blur of the fan to the right, adding foreground, and the open space directly behind the driver, creating a light halo so his head doesn’t blend into the background. Simple things add up to make a photograph.

We were allowed a pit lane walk before the race, which meant, quite obviously, that we all trooped into the pit lane, where each team has its pit: a shallow little garage area, from where the pit crews storm out like ants when their cars come in for tyre changes and refuelling during the race. Pit lane walks are a rage with the crowds, but they can be infuriating to a photographer. While everyone is ogling at the bits and pieces of machinery and the crews, nothing is really happening. In 2004, I was lucky enough to watch Renault do a mock tyre change, and I crouched down, popped a flash to fill in the shadows and did a semi-wide-angle shot. Ferrari did its bit for us, and their pit crew girls came in bright Ferrari-red jumpsuits, but there was none of that glamour this time. Instead, I walked up to the paddock while everyone was downstairs and shot a few cars being wheeled through the crowd. Sometimes you just have to make do with what you have.

As the roar of the cars died down, and the luxury SUVs ferried us back in wave after wave of press, VIP guests and audience groups, Manama was just beginning to light up. The capital is not without character – it seems more real than many of the cities to its east, around the Gulf. Get a taxi to the Bab al Bahrain, gateway to what they insist on calling the souq. It might be more like a warren of little city shops owned by and catering to expatriates (far away from anything traditional or Bahraini), but it has a truthfulness about it that is refreshing after the endless, faceless malls that have become the defining metaphor for the region.

Far away from the roar of engines, the smell of burnt rubber or the garish Gold City, you can walk on and sip chai at a roadside café, where the real atmosphere is. There, in the twilight, I hid my long lenses, stuck on a 35mm, and waited. Eventually, after I had spent a while sipping on a little glass of hot tea and behaving myself by not acting as a tourist and sticking my cameras into everyone’s faces, someone invited me over to the next table.

A collection of Bahraini taxi drivers, labourers and weathered retirees were playing dominoes, tapping the pieces on a warped, worn-out slab of wood, sipping noisily on tea. For me this entry into something real was even more exciting than the Ferrari girl in red latex trying to sell me a Ferrari ashtray while the cars roared in approval behind the stalls. So I cancelled the next group appointment, asked for another mint leaf and slurped the surface of my glass. Cars, no matter how fast, can get passé after a while, but the dynamics of street photography is the story of a lifetime.

There are many ways in which you can shoot life on the street, and Henri Cartier-Bresson perfected his. Most of his photographs were made using a simple 50mm, a truthful jewel that could, if you are man enough, be the single lens with which you explore the world. I first started off with a 50mm, but was attracted to wide-angle zooms, with their surreal views that tricked you into believing them. I spent many years with just one wide-angle zoom lens on my camera, and was even proud of it. I shot Phuket after the tsunami, the old quarter of Sana’a, the ancient graves of Dhofar, the fjords of Khwar Najd and the massive dunes of the Empty Quarter with it.

It wasn’t enough. Or perhaps I just had too much of it. I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way I stopped seeing. I mean, let’s say I am with Obaid my Bedouin guide driving over an ancient camel route through the northeastern Sharqiya desert. There’s nothing around except sand, a tangle of ghaf trees, bleached camel bones and a doorpost leading to nowhere. I am fascinated by the door, half-propped up by a branch. The wide angle creates drama where there isn’t any. I move in closer, and go wider to fit in more. A camel wakes up on the sidelines, and stirs. I flick the lens, go wider still, and now I have it in the corner. It all seems great, but it’s hollow. I have seen nothing, used no judgement. I come home and the shot looks like a mash of all things on the screen. There were too many elements, too many colours, too many shades of light and reflectance, all competing for attention. And there was no reason behind the composition.

This brings us to an interesting annexe of thought within this Bahrain piece. Bear with me for a few paragraphs. The human eye has a wide angle of view (many argue over the exact degree of angle). If you include the periphery of your vision you can see a lot without moving your head, from the top to the bottom and, most of all (since we have two eyes that are arranged horizontally), left to right. Now let’s say you have a lens that encompasses that view (if you take into account peripheral vision you’re almost talking about a 180º fisheye) and you look through it – you will, of course, see everything – and shoot. Now, here’s the interesting thing: if you shoot encompassing everything, there can be no composition. Think carefully: what is composition anyway? It is when you select, or frame, certain subjects in a way that you like, in your viewfinder. You are subtracting the rest of the scene out of the equation. But if you are shooting the entire world, your all-encompassing eye vision, in one go, you’re not selecting anything.

This is one reason why we all aren’t running around with fisheyes (which have the same angle of view of a peep hole in a door). The other is distortion, but this can now be corrected with software. And such wide views needn’t be problems only with an extreme lens like this – you have to start being careful anywhere beyond 28mm. Lenses have got wider and wider, and most photojournalists today sport one zoom that begins at 16 or 17mm. Wide angles can be used to make dramatic images when used carefully, but can be the death of photography when taken for granted.

Now, let’s take the 50mm lens, which I have returned to after many years. It can only hold so much in it, so you are forced to have a strong subject. I mean, you can’t just point it anywhere, like a wide angle, and get everything. You have to point it at something, and, for that, you have to have an eye to see that something, and a brain to decide how you want to arrange it. That is the real beauty of the 50mm, but no one will tell you this. Most people see it in the results but are unaware of the reason behind it. In photography, composition is primary, and the 50 – also known as the ‘normal’ lens – embodies composition.

If you have the appetite for going deeper, composition is just part of the story. Just as a 50mm takes something out of the whole,
photography does, too. How can a flat two-dimensional print of a frozen moment actually be real, when the lives we live are enacted in many more dimensions and, above all, in motion? How did we ever fool ourselves into believing that photos were real and images didn’t lie? The truth is – and this is of supreme importance – that photography is about metaphors. If you want to record life you will have to run around like the Mad Hatter with a fisheye lens on a video camera. But if you want to be a photographer, you have to pick something out of the muddle of life, and yet this one thing has to have enough meaning to stand for life. You have to pick a metaphor. The Afghan girl on the cover of National Geographic was a metaphor. A rock in an Ansel Adams black-and-white print is a metaphor. And perhaps that is the great secret of photography, why a single print can become art while a two-hour film can get a global audience that forgets it by the next Academy Awards. The challenge is finding the metaphor, and, even better, creating it. All we can do is pick at these wisps and see life in them.

So there I was sitting in a back alley of Manama in a little island kingdom in the Middle East, with my back to the Formula One and the sea in front, dodging a mint leaf in a glass. I had always thought of dominoes as a Western game, but to the people sitting down it was very Bahraini, and they called it domna. Domino pieces, originally carved from ivory, were named after Venetian masks called domini, but can be traced back to the East to China, which in turn adapted them from Indian dice. Somewhere along the way, someone introduced them to Arabia, and here I was shooting the game.

I shot the goings-on with a 35mm lens, which is much like the 50, except you can have your strong subject while still keeping room for background. With a 50mm you generally have one layer of subject matter, which makes a strong but simple photograph. A 35mm lens adds another layer, enabling the creation of a more complex, thought-provoking image. This added element gives you elbowroom to play around with your elements for a more interesting composition.

In the end, with limited access and time, I haven’t returned from Bahrain with anything earth-shattering. The images are passable, if a bit pedestrian. But it did lead to some thoughts on photography, and that can only make it better.

Pinaki was a guest of Gulf Air during the Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2007