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TARIQ DAJANI

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Photographer, printmaker, artist, freethinker

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MY STORY

Born in England to a Palestinian father and an English mother, I lived and worked in various countries in Europe and the Middle East. This gave me an appreciation of different peoples and cultures, which informed my relationship with the world.

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My craft in photography and printmaking was shaped over 25 years through commercial work in advertising and design in London, Stockholm and Dubai, and through personal work on various artistic projects.

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Beyond the intellectual and technical, my interest in art leans towards the emotional and the aesthetic. When I like a work of art, it is because I am drawn to it emotionally. Without knowing why, I instinctively know how it makes me feel. When working creatively I aim for elements of beauty and simplicity to naturally, even poetically, come together, and to inform the heart of the vastness within us.

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“It is only with the heart that one can truly see. What is essential is invisible to the eye”. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince".

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From analogue, film-based photography and darkroom printmaking, I moved to the technical excellence of digital image making. Years later, having a need for a manual connection and feel with my work I learned the craft of photogravure printmaking. Today, I combine whatever is needed to achieve a desired result. Art cannot be restrained by technical rules, it is an unbounded form of creative expression.

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My work has been exhibited in various galleries and museums. It is included in private and public collections, including those of the Agha Khan, Bernard Arnault, the Hermes family, the Center for Creative Photography, Arizona, the National Museum of Jordan and members of Royal and ruling families in the Middle East and elsewhere.

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These days I spend much of my time on a rural farm in Galicia, north-western Spain. I combine my creative interests with a healthy, holistic lifestyle tending our organic vegetable garden and fruit trees,  walking our dogs, riding horses and letting my mind wander freely. I continue to pursue art projects, working introspectively with an ever-present connection to the Middle East as the genesis for new ideas. I also tutor a few photography and photogravure printmaking courses in a 100-year old farmhouse studio.

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"There is a strange-making in much of Dajani’s work, a way of making perfectly ordinary things seem quite strange and extraordinary. Such work leaves the viewer feeling touched, moved, disturbed, with a whole complex of emotions, desperately wanting to know more.” John Wood, poet, photographic historian & editor.

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