KARACHI, Jan 10: Art enthusiasts turned in significant numbers at a photography exhibition of senior press photographer Haider Abbas Jaffery, which opened at the Citi Art Gallery in Clifton on Wednesday.

Haider Abbas Jaffery has been associated with the ‘click photography’ for more than three decades and spent most of his career period with evening newspaper The Star.

He is well known among the artists and art lovers for his decades-long coverage of art and culture events.

“It is first time for him (Mr. Jaffery) to hold the centre stage and he is more than deserved for it,” said a guest fascinated by the photographer’s work.

Throughout his professional duties, Mr Jaffery has clicked the camera for thousands of time and snapped wonderful news pictures for his paper both in black-and-white and colour so it was not an easy job to shuffle all those shots and select merely 29 of them to put for display.

The selected pictures are all topical ranging from a street child in rags sleeping beneath a dilapidated concrete bench of a park having only his hands to save him from horrible chill to a toddler carried by his uncle at the City Courts to the grille of a custody van so that his father inside could see and love him. The latter won an APNS award in 1991.

He won another APNS award in 2004 for his picture of a drug addict with all his inner agonies and frustration exposed in his face expression.

“Jaffery’s click photography evokes the gamut of emotions in the viewer, taking him/her on a journey that is at times extremely moving, as in the images of laughing street children, a delightful, grinning small girl dress for a wedding, and a beggar with her baby,” wrote eminent art critic Marjorie Husain in her introductory note for the photographer.

For Mr Jaffery it was his first solo exhibition that’s why he was immensely thrilled and delighted. “I have been part of some seven group exhibitions earlier but it is first solo. It is a great day in my life,” said Mr Jaffery.

The exhibition will continue until January 17 daily from 11am to 8pm. The Citi Art Gallery is located at mezzanine floor, Corniche Residency Apartments, Block 2, opposite Bilawal House, Clifton.