Virtual Event: “Akkasah, NYU Abu Dhabi: Photographic Heritage of the Middle East and North Africa” with Jasmine Soliman

Join the UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the University Libraries and Jasmine Soliman on March 2 at 12:00 p.m. for a Kitab Talk on the photographic heritage of the Middle East. Akkasah, the Center for Photography at New York University Abu Dhabi, is home to an archive of photographic heritage of the Middle East and North Africa with a special focus on histories of the United Arab Emirates. It fosters the scholarly study of these histories and practices in dialogue with other photographic cultures and traditions from around the world through a range of activities, including commissioning new documentary works.

Akkasah collaborates with collectors and families to document and preserve photographic material in analog format and as digital surrogates, and has thus far published over 11,000 images online (representing a third of its collections) with metadata in both Arabic and English. The collections are catalogued at the item-level, with every photographic print, negative or page in a photo album being described as an archival object, allowing for complex website searches and interrogations across collections.

Jasmine Soliman is an archivist at Akkasah with a lead in collections management, responsibility for the user experience of akkasah.org and social media. She will discuss her work on subject headings as pathways to data, the website and the Center’s post-custodial collecting model. Register in advance here.