Charlotta Sparre
Born in Sweden, Charlotta Sparre's professional life for almost 25 years has focused on the Middle East and North Africa, including postings in Libya, Egypt and Jordan and extensive travelling all over the region.
Charlotta has an active and intense interest in political history, humanitarian issues and the contemporary challenges facing the region. Driven by both an insatiable fascination with her surroundings and a limitless curiosity, she manages to explore the dynamics of life wherever she resides.
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A Story About HER
In this series Charlotta portraits women of the Middle East North Africa region and explores elements of “womanhood” as an identity – as girls, women, sisters, friends, mothers, grandmothers, etc. In the region, as elsewhere in the world, women are increasingly represented in all walks of life and in different professions. However, women also to a high degree continue to carry out crucial traditional chores, like fetching and carrying water, washing, cooking and making handicraft. They also tell stories and contribute to their families’ educational and spiritual development and hence play a key role in building and carrying cultural identities from one generation to the other.
East Bank West Bank
Few places in the world have been and are as much of a crossroad as the Middle East. Home to the ancient high cultures around the Mediterranean, birthplace to the three main monotheistic religions, and an historical and cultural melting pot where, throughout history, people from different backgrounds have met, cohabited, fought wars, loved and lived. The nature offers extreme variation from lush river banks to the desert, from the lowest point in the world to the mountains, from the countryside to big cities. And the historical layers are intertwined, sometimes the layers building on each other, sometimes with distinct and unique characteristics.
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ABCD - Amman Beirut Cairo & Damascus
Fascinated by an accidental double exposure photograph that her mother created when she was a child, Charlotta Sparre now applies the technique deliberately to her favourite Middle Eastern cities – Amman, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus.
"The double exposures my mother created were images that were both familiar and yet different, they were images where reality met the dream. I have tried to grasp these sentiments and this sense of dream in my pictures of four Middle Eastern cities, as they for me also represent the meeting of dream and reality."