-
- “Where Heaven and Earth Meet” Jerusalem/alQuds, 2006. Nightime views of the Qubbat al-Sakhra-Dome of the Rock emanating rays of light.
-
- Sunlight streaming through the 14th-c grilles, or lunettes onto the floor. Masjid Jama3a (Friday Mosque or Congregational Mosque), Isfahan, Iran.
-
- From the Portfolio “Liquid & Light” San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers.
-
- From the portfolio “Convivencia: Andalucia.” “Column To The Stars” Granada, 2002.
-
- From the Portfolio “Chthonic” consisting of a series of studies under the plaster cross vaults surrounding the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, Syria.
-
- “Straight for the Spigot” Wadi Rum, Jordan. 1981.
photo@studiosaid.com
studiosaid.com
Awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1981 for “a year of independent study and travel abroad,” Saïd lived with the pastoral Huweitat bedu in Arabia. He sought to replicate the sojourns of al-Muttanabbi, a 10th century poet from Iraq who celebrated a purity of Arabic language that thrived far from urban centers. The experience transformed his creative centers from a focus on verbal poetry and onto that of the visual language and poetry. Saïd’s subsequent “Desert Portfolio” was first exhibited in 1984 at Vision Gallery, San Francisco and comprised the first solo exhibit of photography at the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, Amman.
A practicing architectural photographer, Saïd was commissioned by Harvard emeritus professor Oleg Grabar and the Palestine Welfare Association (Geneva) in 1992 to document the 7th-century Umayyad mosaics in the Muslim shrine Dome of the Rock-Qubbat al-Sakhra, Jerusalem-alQuds. Two volumes resulted, “The Dome of the Rock” and “The Shape of the Holy” published by Rizzoli and Princeton University Press respectively in 1996.
Awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant in 2005, Said engaged the surviving Umayyad aesthetic legacy in Bilad al-Sham (Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria). With that archive and his visions of geometry and inter-connectedness, he works to this day.
Saïd Nuseibeh was raised in San Francisco, California and Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Reed College (BA in English Literature, 1980) in Portland, Oregon and Bir Zeit University, Bir Zeit, Palestine.