Ain't No Mountain High Enough.[1]

Reflections on the photography of Nick Hannes

By Pieter Vermeulen

In the heart of the desert, it is snowing indoors. White flakes swirl down incessantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The snow is real—or should we say “authentic”—while the furnishings are somewhat less so. The room resembles an inverted sauna, a hyper-real winter scene that you step into as effortlessly as taking a shower. The temperature fluctuates between -18 and -15 degrees. This 12-square-meter amusement park can be installed in your home for a minimum price of 100,000 euros. The Dubai-based company behind this, Desert Snow, initially began producing artificial snow for movie sets and photo shoots in 2012 but has since moved on to the real thing. From their snow factory—a large container—the white merchandise is shipped to themed parties and other events. Among sheiks, the snow room has become a status symbol, currently shared only with the world's swankiest cruise ships and hotels. Why take trips exotic destinations when you can bring the winter fun into your own home?

Entertainment reigns supreme in Dubai, with resorts, clubs, attractions, camel races, golf courses and amusement parks offering endless diversions. It’s a city where one can do anything to avoid thinking about anything. Dubai is an almost bottomless vessel of experiences and thrills, from skydives to safaris—a capitalist cocktail that blends play and illusion to drown out the emptiness. Within its confines, the all-consuming imperative of pleasure is accompanied by the neoliberal harm principle: enjoy as long as it does no harm. The leisure industry, rooted in the concept of free time, is only partially free. Civil rights are exchanged for entertainment, and critical voices nipped in the bud. Brave new world.

Fakeness and hyperreality are primarily techniques, cunning ploys to make everything seem real. Take Dubai’s Souk Madinat Jumeirah, for example. It presents itself as an “authentic reproduction of an ancient marketplace in typical Middle Eastern ambiance and style.” Visitors strolling past Venetian-looking waterways, Iranian wind towers, food and spice stalls, and the adjoining hotel might feel like they’re in a ludicrous film set or at an oriental Center Parcs. This newly minted architecture is designed exclusively to soak up the atmosphere, fill shopping bags, and snap a few picturesque photos. The Souk thus becomes a simulacrum of a public space, a pastiche of an agora with the aura of a shopping mall. Consumption is paramount, and culture is reduced to a harmless lifestyle. Security guards and cameras are stationed on every corner, ensuring everything remains as normal as possible.

In its city marketing, Dubai eagerly embraces its epithet, The City of Gold. Since the 1960s, it has been a major hub for the global gold trade, which remains a significant part of its economy. The hospitality industry also capitalizes on this bling-bling image, striving to offer increasingly luxurious products to wealthy customers. For instance, a grill restaurant recently added a new dish on the menu: a marinated sea bass encased in 23-carat gold. Not that it would do anything to the taste, but it’s done simply because it can be. Dubai boasts the world’s tallest tower (the Burj Khalifa), the second largest shopping mall, the largest picture frame (Dubai Frame), the largest dancing fountain, and the Middle East's first indoor ski resort. The city thrives on superlatives, megalomaniac stunts, and excesses, which often excel in both tastelessness and inspiration. It demands very little imagination and a great deal of boredom.

Dubai Global Village markets itself as the largest tourism, entertainment, shopping and leisure project in the world. The park features pavilions from around 90 countries each showcasing famous monuments to scale—from the Colosseum to the Taj Mahal. Global Village offers a range of tourist landmarks in a geographical nutshell, conveniently presented to visitors as bite-sized experiences. Similarly, Falconcity of Wonders, a gated community real estate project initiated in 2005, combines luxury villas, supermarkets, mosques, spas and sports centers with reconstructions like the Falcon Elysées, Town of Venice, and the Dubai Great Wall. From a bird's-eye view, the site forms an immense falcon, the emblem of the United Arab Emirates. In such settings, these architectural reproductions function ndo not serve as mere teasers for visiting the actual destinations but as ersatz, satisfying the tourist Wanderlust. It's likely no coincidence that Dubai was chosen to host the World Expo in 2020.

Dubai exemplifies what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls a global city—a place where urban decision-making, business, marketing, and infrastructure are heavily influenced by a global political-economic regime. It’s astonishing to think that just over half a century ago, the city was a tent camp with barely any access to running water or electricity. After the discovery of its black gold, the economy suddenly boomed, and the population exploded. While the capitalist system rapidly developed in the Gulf region, Dubai diversified its economic portfolio early on, expanding into sectors such as real estate, tourism and hospitality. Today, the emirate is an essential hub in a complex global network of information, communication, mobility and financial flows. With a population of over three million and a majestic skyline hastily built on desert land, Dubai resembles a giant mirage. Ironically, this city, from which the world becomes a village, feels compelled to reconstruct the world as a village. Or perhaps they have taken Marshall McLuhan's words too literally?

Dubai, a city where so much is possible and so little is allowed. Photographer Nick Hannes has visited about five times and has often been disheartened by what he has seen through his lense. A professional camera in Dubai quickly arouses suspicion, which inevitably affects the photographic process. Spontaneity is rather rare in this city. For each photo shoot, Hannes had to obtain permission from the appropriate authorities. Dubai guards its image as meticulously as a company protects its trademark, with the sheikh acting as CEO. Yet, limitations can showcase a master’s skill. Nick Hannes excels when he manages to disrupt the hyper-reality of the metropolis with subtle, seemingly insignificant details. As a photographer, what more can you add to a city that constantly reproduces itself?

Nick Hannes views the world through his lens like a visual sociologist. Individually, his photographs hold documentary value, but taken together, Garden of Delight[2] blossoms into a socio-political satire, a fact that Hannes is not hesitant to acknowledge. In an exhibition context, his photo series (and joint publication) is adorned with commercial slogans from sheikhs, managers, and the like, seamlessly into the scenography like banners. Their unimaginable hypocrisy is juxtaposed with photographic nods, a trademark of Nick Hannes’s style. Many of his images thus appear as palimpsests of cultural codes and ways of seeing, devoid of ambiguity.

Hannes aims to shed light on the evacuation and privatization of public spaces. This includes artificial environments like beach clubs, shopping malls, and privatized beaches. In his approach, Hannes draws inspiration from The Capsular Civilization, a book by Belgian philosopher and activist Lieven De Cauter. This is apparent in his substantial photographic focus on guardrails, walls, and gates, structures catering to the happiness of a select few but evoke a sense of crushing loneliness. These islands of the privileged come at the expense of countless guest workers, mainly from Pakistan, India or Bangladesh, who endure years of separation from their families, residing in barracks outside the city—the epitome of what Giorgio Agamben terms “naked life.” In Nick Hannes' work, these marginalized individuals occupy a significant but subtle place. Although he doesn’t remain indifferent to their plight, he refrains from exploiting their suffering for photographic purposes. Instead, his photos engage in a subtle mirroring game that sometimes ruthlessly exposes the power dynamics of exclusion and subjugation. Every prestigious project that seeks attention inadvertently conceals social suffering from urban view. As an observer, Hannes adamantly refuses to exploit this misery through his lens, believing that only those willing to look closely will see the other side of the coin.

In a more recent photo series and book titled New Capital (2024), Nick Hannes directs his lens towards the often hidden social realities behind the glossy facades of six newly erected capitals: Brasília (Brazil), Abuja (Nigeria), Astana (Kazakhstan), Sejong (South Korea), New Administrative Capital (Egypt), and Nusantara (Indonesia).[3] Devoid of historical context and rooted in patriarchal ideals, these sprawling mirages boast distinctive urban designs with large plazas, boulevards, fountains, statues, and obelisks (Pojani in Hannes 2024:5). Often the brainchild of megalomaniacal politicians and bureaucrats, their larger-than-life appearance can be uncanny or disconnected from everyday life. Situated on fragile terrain and largely funded by fossil fuel capital, these artificial cities uncritically embody neoliberal, individualistic, or authoritarian values. With unparalleled photographic talent, Hannes adeptly captures the frictions and incommensurabilities between utopian visions and the practice of everyday life.

Foucault, In one of his lecture notes, introduced the term heterotopia, spaces of otherness that offer reflection on our human condition, akin to a mirror reflecting back at us. These spaces exist in a liminal state, neither fully here nor there, and have the capacity to juxtapose multiple disparate spaces within a single place. Rather than aligning with the homogeneous, abstract plans of artificial cities, Nick Hannes seeks out the disruptions between utopian ideals and our actual lived experience through a thoughtful juxtaposition of places and people. In this sense, his photographic perspective is shaped by heterotopian thinking. Hannes shares an anthropological interest similar to that of Marc Augé in his seminal book Non-Places (1992). Non-places are typically transient spaces where people come and go, governed by a set of rules, regulations, and prohibitions, and where individuals are identified solely upon entering or exiting. Like a visual anthropologist, Hannes tries to understand the way in which (non-)places influence our human experience and identity, and how they reflect the state of our society at large.

As he concludes his lecture, Foucault appears to have identified the quintessential heterotopia: the ship, “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (27). This description could suitably apply to a cruise ship—a colossal symbol of luxury, decadence, and pollution also portrayed by Hannes—but it also resonates with the increasing number of icebergs drifting around our planet. As is well known in business circles, every crisis offers an opportunity, especially in the case of Abdulla Alshehi’s Iceberg Project. Tapping into a plan that has been brewing for decades, his ambition is to tow a massive block of ice from Antarctica to the Emirates, and use it as both a source of drinking water and a tourist attraction. At the Dubai World Expo in 2020, the project was self-proclaimed as "one of the most significant inventions of the century" and has been patented with the UK Intellectual Property Office.

Eight years ago, I finally had the opportunity to view "The Garden of Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The retrospective exhibition of the 15th-century artist attracted a massive crowd, and the museum was packed. The triptych itself was shielded by a balustrade, and visitors jostled to catch a glimpse of the ominous masterpiece, with their smartphones poised for photos. Few seemed to care about the moral of the story. As I maneuvered my way back out through the turnstiles, I overheard someone remark, "Europe is bankrupt. We have history, and that's it. In the future, Europe will be like a dinosaur—that's where we're headed."

I gaze wistfully at a photograph captured by Nick Hannes—a dinosaur park left abandoned beneath an overpass in Dubai—and ponder if that bleak scene represents our impending future. Will our history be all that remains, and who will be the one to declare the old continent bankrupt? Will it require yet another sudden crisis, or will it be a gradual, inevitable demise? These concerns may seem dystopian, but what Nick Hannes presents to us is anything but fictional. Despite the absurdity of man-made islands, air-conditioned beaches, and underwater villas, isn’t this allegorical "garden of delights” familiar territory for us all?

Works cited

De Cauter, Lieven. The Capsular Civilization. On the City in the Age of Fear. Rotterdam: NAi, 2004.

Foucault, Michel; Miskowiec, Jay. “Of Other Spaces”. Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1986, pp. 22-27.

Hannes, Nick. Garden of Delight. Veurne: Hannibal Books, 2018.

Hannes, Nick. New Capital. Building Cities from Scratch. Tielt: Lannoo Publishers, 2024.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991.

(The Sleep of Reason. Critical Perspectives in Contemporary Art, MER Books / Owl Press, 2024)

[1] Motown song by Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson, used as a soundtrack for the choreographed Dubai Fountain, in a cover by Vula Malinga.

[2] Garden of Delight received the Magnum Photography Award in 2017 and the Zeiss Photography Award in 2018.

[3] The series on Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC) was awarded a World Press Photo Award in 2023.