Contrasting Arabia: Hotel Zaatari and Wilfred Thesiger : Saïd Business School, Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP

A contemporary photographic and film journey through the Zaatari Refugee Camp photographed by Anthony Dawton and Jim McFarlane - filmed by Mais Salman and Zaid Baqaeen  in contrast with the mid 20th century photographs of Wilfred Thesiger

 

Anthony Dawton is an award winning commercial photographer, winning the Fuji Industrial Photographer of the Year, amongst others.  His clients include Mercedes Benz, J Walter Thompson, Tetrapak, the BBC, British Gas and his work has been published in the British newspapers the Guardian and the Independent. He was photographer in resident for the iconic arts magazine Funoon Arabia. His overseas clients include the Monte Carlo Opera House, the Louvre, the Museum of Iraq, the Abha Festival in Saudi Arabia and Xenal Industries, Saudi Arabia as well as the Government of Oman.

 

He was one of six photographers to be featured in Australian CCP exhibition that toured South East Asia for twelve months in 2010. Images from a UNICEF/Al Madad project in Niger were selected to show at the 2009 Sony World Photographic Awards, in Cannes. Anthony Dawton has been a contributing photographer to the The Silent Witnesses book series Kashmir's Children The Silent Witnesses of the Earthquake  and  Desert Faces, The Silent Witnesses of the Niger Children.

 

In 2010 Anthony Dawton, along with his colleague Jim McFarlane, entered Gaza in the wake of the Israeli “incursion” the previous year, to photograph the effect on young people and the challenging landscape that they and their families were living in. Photographs taken during his time in Gaza form a part of the Children of Gaza Exhibition project that has currently raised over $250,000 for Save the Children projects in Gaza.

In 2013 the same duo entered what is now the largest refugee camp in the world, Camp Zaatari. The resulting images and film known as the Hotel Zaatari Project are about to begin a tour of the Middle East as well as the United States.

 

In October 2014 the TMCP V.VC. Vorovsky factory in Tikhoretsk, Russia invited Anthony Dawton and Jim McFarlane to photograph the workers continuing a tradition of recording the service given and the sacrifices made by the employees from before the time of the revolution, through the Great War to the present day. This exhibition will open at the TMCP Factory in February 2015 and then transfer to Moscow and from there provisionally to New York.

 

Anthony lectures in London on photography and counts Lewis Hines, Eugene Smith, Michael Duane, Jim Goldberg and Jeffrey Wolin as important influences on his work and approach to photography.