Ana Nance has been traveling for 30 years and has nearly photographed 80 countries as a professional photographer. Edited out of her extensive archive is a personal project made up of unseen and intimate photographs to these countries and places. They are a non judgmental close-up views into other cultures intended to reveal complex, new and rich realities.

The selection of photographs presented here is a part of Chapter 1, which are the Arabic countries of, The Republic of Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco and Algeria taken from 2012 to 2021. The objective is to break stereotypes that are often placed on this part of the world by leaving behind current issues and not exhausting the emersion into the different social realities of these countries but instead embracing their affirmative rich cultures on all levels. This is achieved through fragments, details in architecture, landscape, and objects in daily life, the common things that sometimes can escape our view. The photographer likes to discover and finds comfort in drawing attention to the forgotten or mundane. She asks the viewer to stay and observe each image therefore participating in her journey of what she describes as “life experiences that transform and enrich us along this walk of life.” She also believes that we are reflections of all the places, moments and people that have influenced us in some shape or form. Her view becomes scrutinizing, searching for surprise impacted by these found details in life that have therefore impacting us. The result transforms into her perspective of beauty and contemplation.

In each photograph, Ana Nance constructs a stage with a fable or allegory that force us to look at each place in a different way. Upon reading One Thousand and One Nights, she realized that she too must continue telling stories in order to preserve and diversify cultures that she has been so fortunate to experience, with images as simple vestiges. Vestiges of lost and modern worlds that in parallel reveal our current world. Presidents, leaders, societies, communities, individuals, influences and trends all change though what remains are footprints in nature and on our earth. Human migration and progress leave behind the abstract metophors of faded flags as evidence of the passing of time.

The color photographs in this collection are evidences of a world in transformation where the present and past, the urban and rural come together and are more present than people. Ana Nance constructs a unique personal poetic photographic language in a narrative stamped by repetitive subjects and syllables that underline a great body of work based on her notes and visual diaries. There is a certain painterly resonance that touch us with the feeling that she paints in pictures celebrating life and beauty that invite us to contemplate our options.