Part 1 – Dalla Showroom for Car Auction

Doha is a photogenic city. Not in the way Paris or Cape Town maybe, but it has a haphazard charm that loves the lens. I’ve lived in the city all of six weeks, and driven an abused Mitsubishi for a week, so losing my bearings started soon after pulling out of my compound. This was a good thing, considering my mission, which was to get lost as quickly as possible.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, midsummer in the Gulf, and the skies swept clean by a weeklong wind. I hadn’t shot anything since arriving, but had spotted a few great potentials, if only I could find them again. I was looking for sparse shots, something run down and decrepit, and the industrial areas seemed like a good place to start.

I headed away from the city centre, turning at junctions on whichever road seemed the widest or busiest, hunting the abandoned outskirts. An off-ramp suggested the Sanai’a Industrial Area, which seemed a solid bet. At first, it looked ideal, a mix of reconstruction and decline, poverty and prosperity. It wasn’t long before the emptiness started to look a little crowded. The otherwise deserted Friday streets were busy, although none of the businesses were trading. Clumps of people lined the sidewalks, talking among themselves or staring at the traffic. It wasn’t long before I hit gridlock, the roundabout ahead a tangle of cars.

Something was going on, it wasn’t clear what. It reminded me of the illegal street racing I’d seen back in Durban. Impromptu meets organised on the internet where fly people and fast cars congregated at strange hours to test the mettle of their modified GTIs and M3 BMWs, and invariably ended up killing someone. But the crowd wasn’t right, and this was too big to be drag racing. Pedestrians were walking out into the stalled traffic and speaking to drivers, some leaning up to the waist through passenger windows, others popping the bonnet to look at the engine.

A burly guy in a salmon shirt, precisely pressed slacks and aviator shades tapped on the glass. I gave the window two inches and leaned across. “You want beer?” he asked. “No”, I replied. Hell yes, I thought to myself. Could this be the big Doha booze market, middle of a Friday afternoon in a distant strip of industrial district? That didn’t fit the bill either. There were too many people, too much activity for this to be illicit. I wasn’t moving anywhere, and the crowds were getting denser further in, so I parked the Lancer and got my kit out the back. I had made the mistake of wearing what appeared to be a crucifix on my shirt – it was an Ankh, but I realised most people weren’t going to care for the difference, and I’d learnt in Dubai that some people found it odious.

Soon I realised that cars were the draw card. Ten year-old Corollas and dubious sounding Mustangs were parked in the dust on both sides of the roads, and hand written signs in Arabic pasted in the windows.

I took a few snaps, looking to get the dust and noise and jam of cars. It wasn’t working – from the ground it just looked messy. I spotted the half built shell of a showroom, open and seemingly abandoned. The concrete staircase led to a roof two storeys up. From there I could see the extent of it. Three city blocks crammed with people, cars and a hanging cloud of dust. I could hear the unmistakable babble of auction, and after capturing a few shots of the mêlée, I headed in the direction of the sale.

The Dalla Showroom for Car Auction was an open lot, a single corrugated sunshade splitting the space. One side was empty, the other sported two rows of beaters – cars of suspicious lineage, all under the hammer and up for immediate sale, buyer beware. Megaphones were suspended from the ceiling and powered with a pair a of crocodile clips to the car battery of the vehicle on the block. At any one time, five or six cars were being called, the auctioneers competing to outshout or out-style their competitors. Some of the beaters got more attention than others – a white Mercedes, five or six years old with 200K on the clock was getting solid bids, while a camper van, at least thrice the age and an odometer that had likely done at least one full rotation, sat echoing the mounting pleas of its caller.

I was getting mixed reactions. One or two of the auctioneers posed and played up for the camera. But a younger guy, dressed in dish-dash and Ferrari cap, glared at me. His friend approached and spoke aggressively in Arabic. “Is it okay?” I asked, kicking myself for the Ankh on my tee. “Why?” he barked back.

“I work for a magazine,” I said, flapping my hands like pages and trying to appear as diminutive as possible. He squared up, flaring his chest and lifting his jaw, and I decided that the best course of action was to find something less aggressive to shoot.

The day wore on. The cars destined to sell were sold and those destined to cling to their owners like so much crumbling upholstery and cracked vinyl did just that. Soon enough the gridlock began to flow and the hostile stares ebbed with it. I climbed into the Lancer and made my way through the stretching shadows of an industrial afternoon, with no clue of how to get home.