What would Dubai have looked like, when it would have been built 150 years ago? That’s what Martin Becka shows in an amazing series of photos taken in 2008. The images were captured using Gustave Le Gray’s waxed paper negative process on an 1857 camera. Under the name of ‘Transmutations: Capturing Dubai Using the 19th Century Techniques in Photographs’, photos were exhibited in October and November 2009 at Dubai’s Empty Quarter Gallery. The exposition was completely dedicated to Becka’s work.

“By staging a collision between the historical and the present time, Becka creates a deliberate anachronism and therewith takes us far from the usual expectations we harbor towards Dubai. The architecture and the town planning of this emblematic city of the 21st century seem to span time, as if looking at them from a future we will not live to see. The result is strangely archaeological. The city, with its avenues, monuments, squares, bridges and roads takes on, to some extent, the appearance of ancient monuments. These photographs cloak the present in the permanence of an historic record and give the fleeting moment of the here and a semblance of eternity. In Becka’s earthly warm and exquisitely detailed salted paper prints a monument has been erected for the future generations of Dubai.”

In Time Out Dubai, Becka tells about his imagination:

“In my photographs, the cities are transformed into an imaginary, almost archeological state. I remove all permanent agitations – the fury of noise pollution. I instil calm into the scenes and leave more room for poetry – the poetry of avenues, as it were. The construction takes on the appearance and beauty of the monuments of antiquity. For me it is very far removed from the nightmarish, apocalyptic world depicted in Metropolis.”

On ‘How to be a Retronaut’, Sheilak reacts on the comparison with the silent movie ‘Metropolis’ that Fritz Lang made in 1927 to stress his fear for the mechanical city produced by modernists at that moment. It’s interesting to see how Lang’s dystopia is still being used as an aesthetic and moral framework for modern architecture, 83 years after its production. Only the imaginary comparison with the early days of modern architecture caused by the camera techniques used by Becka, makes Dubai look a historical city, comparable with New York during the days that the Empire State Building was being constructed.