How rich does a country have to be before it can afford to have people dressing up as street urchins as a matter of fashion? How comfortable within its own skin before it can tolerate those who have tattooed and pierced theirs? How much culture does it need to have before it can have a counterculture?

Whatever the threshold, the tiny, flashy, adolescent Arab state of the UAE has passed it, suggests Spanish photographer Miguel Trillo in his current exhibition at Abu Dhabi’s Ghaf Gallery. In his online profile — tellingly blocked by the UAE’s internet censors — Trillo compares himself to a cross between Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. These are two freak hunters of a very different stripe, and by far the more apt formal comparison is to Clark. Lauded and reviled in equal measure for “Kids,” his obscenely accurate portrait of drug-taking, virgin-defiling skate punks in the 1990s, Clark made his darkest mark on the art world with his debut 1972 monograph “Tulsa,” which covers much of the same territory, if from a less lecherous distance. If Arbus’ subjects’ status as freaks is something thrust on them by a cruelly chaotic word, Clark’s subjects’ is more like an upturned middle finger – not an original gesture, but an easy-to-read signifier of a readiness to veer from what has come before. Citing him is code for many things, but most of all is shorthand, and perhaps a kind of apology, for a lifelong fascination with the darker, sexier, more experimental dimension of adolescence.

And so they are mostly teenaged faces that peer out from the 33 photographs mounted as part of the gallery’s “Aliens” exhibit by three Spanish artists-in-residence. It’s the first pure photography exhibit for the two-year-old gallery—one of only a handful in a city that will soon be home to both a Guggenheim and a Louvre—and as such, it’s remarkably daring. There are disorienting digitally enhanced cityscapes and office interiors by Miguel Oriola, and campy, retro-futuristic shots by Evru of people dressed up alien-like couture in the desert that resemble stills from a Kenneth Anger film. Against these, Trillo’s portraits of punks, BMX bikers, breakdancers, B-Boys, goths, DJs, “emos,” and taggers appear almost pedestrian – except that, if you walk around Abu Dhabi and Dubai for a while, you’ll notice that you never, ever see people who look like this.

And therein lay the challenge. For decades, Trillo’s normal mode of working was is to stroll around Madrid (though he now lives in Barcelona) and take shots of members of subcultures in their natural habitats. But in the UAE, people don’t walk. The closest thing to public life during most of the year occurs in malls, where people with more alternative leanings often fear to let their freak flags fly for fear of police harassment. (Tattoos and piercings are banned to varying degrees in different emirates.) So Trillo needed a less passive strategy for smoking out the “underground” he had come to photograph. Enter Cesar Espada, cultural attaché of the Spanish embassy and curator of the exhibit.

Espada became more of a collaborator than curator to Trillo, helping him hunt down subjects with his fluent English (Trillo’s is not) and disarming charisma. The main strategy was to go into schools “and ask people if they know any strange people,” Espada said. Inevitably, they pointed to the one kid in the class with the Ramones T-shirt, who would in turn happen to know all the other punks in town. Each subject was then photographed against a more or less nondescript urban background and identified only by his or her city: Abu Dhabi or Dubai. The result is the impression that the UAE has a thriving jumble of subcultures – which is both true and not.

Fashionistas in fluorescent tutus and T-shirts, taggers with painting masks around their necks and their outdoor artwork drying behind them, a droog-like musician with his underwear on the outside held up by a pair of black suspenders — all look challengingly at the camera, as if to say, “You want to make something of it?”

One girl in jeans and a T-shirt doesn’t seem to be wearing any youth cultural costume at all, outside of an understated punk bracelet. But in the back of the catalog, where the nationality of each subject is listed, everything is explained: She’s an Emirati, from a culture where women rarely let themselves be photographed period, let alone without their black abayas and headscarves. Of all the revolutionary costumes, hers was unquestionably the boldest.

But most of the subjects, like 85 percent of the population, are expatriates, and have imported their subculture from their home countries. The most striking example is a lanky British teenager photographed in his punk poster-lined bedroom with his hair in full liberty spikes and an electric guitar across his lap. He plays in a band and hangs out with the most popular punks in Dubai, but Espada explained that he was too afraid of police harassment to wear his spikes in public.

It’s a startling thing for me to hear coming from New York, where rising rents on the Bowery turned CBGBs into a T-shirt shop commemorating itself and the punks on St. Mark’s Place are viewed more like clowns reenacting ancient archetypes than any kind of threat to social order. But such is the mainstream’s ability to co-opt everything, especially those things aiming pointed objects directly at it. There is so much money to be made from selling kids the idea that they can smash the state, it’s funny to think than any investment-hungry emerging economy would erect barriers to this kind of identity building.

But then I remember that, though eager to diversify with the help of foreign investment, the economy of the UAE is not exactly emerging. It was more like shot up out of the earth in the 1970s on a geyser of oil. Nowhere is the metaphor of a deluge of wealth more apt, as it was an excess of liquid – and today, with record oil prices, windfall surplus profits from that liquid – that created this frenzied building of skyscrapers, art museums and islands in the sea.

With these things came the people who knew how to make them, and with them came their children: restless, creative and questioning like children anywhere, except perhaps, in their innocence and adolescence, more truly of their place than the people who are now hard at work making that place. Their presence, though unplanned and perhaps even officially unwanted, shows just how far this country has come in such a short time.

Trillo’s stated goal is to document these people – whose alternative fashion choices he has dubbed “modernity” – as they forge the first wave of counterculture in a fast-moving but essentially very traditional place. It’s a remarkable anthropological achievement, and despite his protestations to the contrary, one of the most postmodern things I’ve seen in years. After all, these young people aren’t trying to create new forms as much as sing along to a distant song being broadcast from the other side of the globe, often from another decade entirely.

In the end, although nothing about Trillo’s photographs indicate they were shot in the Middle East, he has managed to create a quintessentially UAE aesthetic experience. I walk away from his exhibit feeling the same disorientation I feel leaving the mall filled with girls in abayas and mittens shushing down an indoor ski slope. The signifier has been detached from the signified, and the sign is now blowing around by itself in the hot desert wind. The real question is whether this kind of nihilism isn’t actually very punk rock.

Copyright Last Exit 2008