A local advertising company found my work through Flickr, and approached me to do a series of photos on various places of interest in Kuwait.
I jumped at the opportunity because, for some reason or another, I had never visited most of these places in my 15 years in Kuwait. I was provided a list of places to photograph. Some of them were the usual suspects like Kuwait Towers, Liberation Towers, Scientific Center etc., for which I already had some some good pictures. The second list was exclusively for museums, which I had never visited.
So during the weekend, I packed my photo gear and headed out with my son in tow (he loves to accompany me on my photo shoots). We first reached the Memorial museum (next to the KPC building in Shuwaikh). The place looked deserted and closed. After poking around the place a bit, we found one lady who assured us the museum was indeed open - and after paying the KD 1 entrance fee, opened the museum just for us!. The museum was very interesting with a sort of an automated guided tour describing the whole Iraq invasion / atrocities commited / liberation etc. through an audio commentary accompanied by mock setups.
This pretty much described the reception that we got in the other museums that we visited (Al Hashemi II marine museum, Tareq Rajab Museum, and the biggest of them all - the National Museum). In all the places, it looked like we were the only people who visited the museum that day, which is a shame really because there is some really fascinating stuff there.
I will visit all these museums once again - but this time, without the camera equipment so that I can appreciate them better.
Fantastic Cajie, seriously very well done and its great that you are doing this! I wish they had a program for children to visit these museums every few months on a school trip so that people can get a real view into what happened in Kuwait, too bad they are going to waste and nobody is visiting them. Again thank you.
ReplyDeleteMaybe at the end of the day ,, you can make a book of picture ...
ReplyDeleteyou could call it
"Kuwait yesterday , today & Tomorrrow " :-)
Marzouq,
ReplyDeleteIndeed!!
The National Museum, for example, is such a big place with so much potential - yet it is deserted.
In fact, it was my son who told me about the place after visiting it as part of their school field trip.
Rayboy,
I am current stringing together all my good pictures of Kuwait to print it as a book from www.blurb.com.
That's cool that they approached you - Congrats!
ReplyDeleteAnd also cool that you got to see the museums.
Most ARE pretty cool.
Did you get to see the Red Fort in Jahra? They made a little museum out of that one too :)
And I like the Calligraphy one too.
There are still many on my to Do list, sigh ;)
(http://nicoleb.org/b2/)
I finally made it to the Marine Museum.
ReplyDeleteI was a bit disappointed of that one, but the Al HAshemi2 is impressive....Jee....!
Now, I know I had some Info about it somewhere, can't find it, ggrrr..... ;)
I'm missing your updates :)!!
As always an excellent posting.The
ReplyDeleteway you write is awesome.Thanks. Adding more information will be more useful.
Bathmate