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Dipti Nair
Doha
Today Qatar is a very modern country, with advanced infrastructure and world-class facilities. But it was not always like this. The transformation of Qatar from a few villages on the shoreline to this amazing country through photographs makes for fascinating viewing.
The World as It Was is a Brazil-based Facebook community that shares visual material such as photographs, moving images and paintings from the past. Created by Brazilian chronologist Luiz Estrella in October 2015, the page was initially called The Age of Empires and later changed to The World as It Was. Their catalogued collection currently consists of over 10,000 images a vast majority of which are yet unpublished - depicting at least 1,600 locations on five continents. The page also has 18 images of Qatar.
The page is the brainchild of 40-year-old Estrella, who is the sole person involved in its upkeep and maintenance.
"I am the editor, the researcher, the manager, in charge of public relations, in fact, I'm everything, the only one involved," said Estrella."I'm a former history student from Rio de Janeiro. I'm passionate about history, especially American and European history. I'm also very keen on finding things on the internet. This is what prompted me to start this page."
The material shared on the website was mostly produced until 1920."The choice to publish material produced before 1920 is due to the fact that, in most countries, works older than 100 years are in the public domain, without any restriction of use. Another reason is that many similar Facebook pages dedicated to the theme 'history' through images, deal with more recent events," he said.
In the first year of its existence, the World as It Was only shared vintage photographs but then they posted their first videos, which became so popular that they decided to do it more often. By October 2017, the webpage plans to publish 43 videos with over four hours of original footage produced between 1899 and 1918.
Estrella says that the material on the webpage was produced by over 1,100 authors including renowned visual artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alice Austin, Bernardo Bellotto, Eugene Atget, Jan van der Heyden, Johannes Vermeer, Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Fox Talbot. This vast material portrays landscapes, personalities, historical events that shaped the world and images of celestial bodies obtained in astronomical observations made at the time.
The World as It Was focuses on providing the best picture of a bygone era, and while the photographs and moving images provide a very good rendition of the time, it is limited to the years after the advent of the camera. Visual representations from the period before that can only be obtained through paintings and so, in July 2017, the World as It Was added paintings to its repertoire, restricting them to those only produced before 1840.
But all this work is not easy.
"Among all the activities related to the maintenance of The World as It Was, prospecting for the visual material is the most time-consuming task," asserts Estrella."I started an extensive online research in mid-2014 in order to identify the sources with iconographic material that met my publishing criteria. It is an arduous and continuous effort. In just over three years of research, 810 sources were identified in 56 countries on five continents with good quality visual material available online that meets the page's publishing criteria."
Estrella says that most of the content has been sourced from Europe (60 percent) and the Americas (33 percent), from public and private, national and institutional sources the world over.
The collection is also represented in an uncomplicated way on the Facebook page, properly organised into albums according to geographic and thematic criteria with each image stored in the folder of the country where it was produced, providing greater convenience for users. Also for the convenience of the users and to educate them, each photograph has at least three basic articulars: title, publication date and material origin.
The images of Qatar sourced by The World as It Was include photographs of the Clock Tower, Hamad Hospital, the Souq and even a rare click of Sheikh Abdulla bin Jassim al Thani at an oil well. But compared to rest of the material on the webpage, the photographs of Qatar are those produced between 1920 and 1970.
"Unfortunately the visual material depicting countries of the Arabian Peninsula is extremely difficult to source, especially the Gulf countries. I have only 18 photos of Qatar and they have all originated from foreign sources," explains Estrella."My aim with this Facebook page is to bring the attention of people to the importance of cultural heritage in our lives and show how the urban landscapes have changed over the last century."
Want to get a slice of history? Visit and like WorldasitWas on Facebook to turn back time and glance at the world as it was then.
In the following days, Qatar Tribune will publish all the photographs of Qatar in a series. Keep an eye out!
