Exhibition tells Jordan's story in rare pictures

AMMAN — An exhibition showcasing the “largest and rarest” photo collection of Jordan’s history opened on Tuesday at the University of Jordan's (UJ) library.

The exhibition is a collection of 550 photos depicting milestones in the Kingdom's history from 1862 to 1946, telling the country’s story visually.

"What I have seen is a mobile museum, which echoes nostalgia to the past and its values, and arouses admiration of the forefathers and the builders of Jordan,” Senator Marouf Bakhit, who inaugurated the exhibition, told The Jordan Times.

The event is organised by Jordan Heritage NGO, and supported by the King Abdullah II Fund for Development. 

Muath Dheisat, a researcher at the NGO and at the Centre for Strategic Studies at UJ, told The Jordan Times that the event came to fill the gap between the oral and visual traditions of the Kingdom's heritage, and to address the shortage in visual archives.

“The main question when we started this organised scientific research was: When was the first photograph in Jordan ever taken? We found that it dated back to 1862 at the Dead Sea, taken by a traveller,” Dheisat added.

He noted that the exhibited photos were selected from 8,500 pictures collected by Mohammad Atia Alawani, who embarked 18 years ago on a mission to collect and restore old photos of Jordan’s history. 

The exhibition at UJ, which will continue for three months, is open from noon to 10pm.