Camille Zakharia: Coastal Promenade

Camille Zakharia uses his camera to document the journey taken since his departure from Lebanon in 1985. Born in 1962 in Tripoli, Zakharia fled his country's civil war, and spent time in the US, Turkey, Greece and Canada before moving to Bahrain in 1999. A graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax, Canada), and a Bachelor of Engineering from the American University of Beirut, Zakharia received numerous accolades for his work and exhibited in distinguished venues across North America and the Middle East. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the prestigious Jameel Prize at the Victoria & Albert Museum for Islamic art.

Coastal Promenade was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of Bahrain as part of the Reclaim project, which won Bahrain the Golden Lion Award in their participation at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennal. The series looks at the present state of the archipelago's coastline, devasted over the last few years by urban change.
Adopting the classical documentary tradition, Camille Zakharia has produced an inventory of the shoreline's landscapes and architecture of lost, desolate zones devoid of animal, plant or human life. And yet these places possess a fragile everyday beauty: beneath a cloudless sky, a sprinkling of fishermen's huts stands as relics of a declining culture - an architecture without architects, as the photographer calls it, which is equally threatened by political and social change.

Coastal Promenade