Photo walk captures Amman’s landscape in a different light

AMMAN — Focusing on local experience and talents, Darkroom Amman, a project that aims to promote analogue photography, recently launched an exhibition titled “Internal Emotion, External Emptiness”. 

Darkroom Amman provides film development, printing and workshops at their gallery in Jabal Luweibdeh.

A photo walk with Darkroom offered a space for a group of young artists to document, in black and white photos, streets, passages, buildings and architecture in Jabal Luweibdeh, Jabal Amman and the old downtown.

One of the exhibition’s participants, George Khouri, was drawn to the project to capture “the nooks and crannies of the street” he has walked on all his life.

Photography has always been “a companion” to Khouri who completed his film studies at The London College of Communications.

“One thing that’s always fixated my line of vision is a singular light that’s a different bulb from the others. That always means there’s an alleyway there. I like to call them ‘whimsical alleys’, and I could attribute this affinity to the original Disney animation of Alice in the Wonderland, with the way certain nooks are lit differently in the dark,” Khouri elaborated.

Regarding the art scene in Amman, Khouri believes that it’s both vibrant and thriving with talent “if you know where to look”. 

One such artist is Baha Sleiman who experiments with different forms of street photography and whose work was presented at the exhibition that opened on March 1.

“These photos captured surroundings of this place, people and neighbourhoods of Jabal Luweibdeh and Jabal Amman, and each photo represents a thought or a feeling,” Sleiman noted, adding that with black and white pictures the artists can capture “raw” emotions that are not as easily cast with coloured photos.

The exhibition runs through until April 1.