Series of colour photographs made in the Sultanate of Oman between 2009-2011.
The Arabian sky seems bigger, more expansive. Looking through the car window under miles of big blue sky, occasionally stopping to look closer and be nearer to something tangible. The stark landscape, vast and still, exposed to the beating sun and seemingly impenetrable is scattered with humdrum evidence of ordinary human lives.
Until I was nine years old the Sultanate of Oman was my home. Twenty years later I moved back to teach photography in Muscat, returning to live in the same neighbourhood I had grown up in. My intention had been to use photography to retrace memories of childhood, yet little seemed familiar enough to evoke the emotional recognition I had expected.
Through a chance encounter I met someone, and together we began to leave the city for long periods whenever possible. I started to make pictures during our long road trips, exploring a place I did not know, a country that in truth, I had little relationship with, but wanted to penetrate in some way with my camera.
This work is a sketch of that personal adventure. A transient observer, drawn in by scenes that were at once alien and banal, I unwittingly created a metaphor for my own disconnectedness and by extension the ubiquitous separateness of the archetypal ‘stranger’ in a foreign land.