DESCRIPTION

Adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses, he opens a plain white envelope and fans out‘The Slaughterhouse’, a photo essay documenting the ritual slaughter of goats and sheep on Eid Al Adha in Khorfakkhan, a rural town in the Emirate of Sharjah. The photographs follow a crowd of men, many of whom are dressed in the traditional white kandora robe, as they shepherd the stock to their prescribed deaths. The animals’ blood carpets white tile, and while the contrast is shocking, there is also an abstract beauty to the way in which Attar has painstakingly documented each second of an ancient ritual.

The images were shown at the Emirates Fine Arts Society’s annual photography exhibition and mark a new stage in Al Attar’s practice in which he is moving away from documentary photography and towards fine arts photography.

-Danna Lorch
*A version of this text originally appeared in Selections Magazine