In images, in picturesDuring a stay in the sultanate, the American photographer Ryan Debolski went to meet the immigrant workers who are exhausted on the construction sites of the cities of the Gulf. Capturing them in their rare moments of relaxation, he offers these young men a unique image.
From the Sultanate of Oman, a petromonarchy on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, the Western public knows very little. Since the end of the Marxist-inspired uprising that shook it in the 1960s and 1970s, the country has been moving more or less under the radar of the media. The death a year ago of Sultan Qaboos, father of the Omani nation, in power for nearly fifty years, has not made any waves. In a few hours, the country acquired a new sovereign, Sultan Haitham, and plunged back into the mixture of opacity and tranquility that he jealously cultivates. Nothing to do with its Gulf neighbors, like the turbulent emirate of Qatar, the rowdy principality of Dubai or the shadowy kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The first merit of the American photographer Ryan Debolski is to have brought back images of this little-known country, away from the media circuits. He stayed there between 2014 and 2015 with his studies completed as part of the Fulbright scholarship program. The young man initially planned to take an interest in Omani landscapes: the cliffs that fall into the turquoise waters of the Arabian Sea, the lush palm groves nestled at the bottom of the wadi, the chiseled fjords of Ras Musandam, on the Strait of Hormuz. . Very marked tourist imagery.
A tribute
But, very quickly, his interest shifted to the small groups of men playing on the beach, on the edge of his home. Asian workers, for the most part Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, hired on the construction sites of the sultanate and representative of the cheap labor, forced to thank you, who built the cities of the Gulf. Of these desert proletarians, Ryan Debolski offers an unusual vision.
Instead of freezing them in their overalls, covered with dust, worn out with fatigue, as we often see them, he grabs them in a rare moment of relaxation, on the sand, forming a human pyramid or s’ exercise in wrestling. Its objective lingers on their bodies, their muscles, the water droplets on their skin. In this sexualized approach, which borrows from the codes of fashion photography, there is a form of respect, of homage.
These color photographs, full of human warmth, contrast with the other images, in black and white, describing the mineral universe, almost lunar, in which these workers live. A road that gets lost in the desert, the menacing silhouette of a mountain range, a building under construction bristling with reinforcing bars. It looks like in Salt cities, the saga of Saudi novelist Abdel Rahman Mounif, which tells of the transformation of the Arabian Peninsula as a result of the discovery of oil.
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