The Difference Between Documenting a Building and Authoring an Image

Jun 14

Most architectural photography is documentation. It records a building accurately, shows the spaces, and serves a brochure or a listing. That work is necessary, and it is a real skill. I do something next to it. I am Ahmad Alnaji, and I founded SARAB Art Production, a fine art architectural photography studio in Dubai, to treat a building as a subject worth a story, the way a portrait or street photographer treats a human being. The images are meant to hold up as fine art, well beyond a record of what something looks like. I am an artist before I am a photographer, and that order decides everything that follows.

It is also the reason the work travels. Foster + Partners licensed my photographs of their Lusail Towers, Saudi Aramco commissioned the images of Ithra, and Qatar Tourism brought me on to photograph the country’s landmarks. Each came for the same thing, an image that holds up long after the building stops being news.

Museum Of The Future - Commissioned by MOTF

Zayed National Museum

Ithra - Commissioned for Saudi Aramco

I studied architecture for three years before moving into photography full-time. And this has been a blessing, enabling me to see architecture as its architect intended. An architect is taught to see why a building is shaped the way it is: how it interacts with light, how a form responds to its context, and what the design idea is. I photograph that intent, the reasoning beneath the surface. And the images follow the same logic the architect used. It is why architects tend to recognize their own thinking in the imagery we produce.

The test I apply is simple and strict. A technically correct photograph that carries no idea and says nothing to the viewer is a failure to me. Composition and light are the easy part, well, kind of. The hardest part, though, is whether the image has a reason to exist, whether someone would stop in front of it the way they stop in a museum. That standard is the difference between a frame that fills a slot and a frame someone wants on their wall. I aspire to achieve the latter.

Ain Dubai Captured Differently

One Za'abeel Dubai fine art hero shot

NMOQ by Jean Nouvel - Commissioned for Qatar Tourism

This is why commercial commissions and fine art are not separate businesses for SARAB. SARAB photographed the Museum of the Future, and that imagery was used by the museum and the UAE Government Media Office in official promotion of the building, and as art prints for sale. Saudi Aramco commissioned SARAB to create the fine art imagery and hero shots of the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, a remarkable building designed by Snøhetta that many photographers travel to shoot. In both cases the work began as a commission and ended as something with value beyond the brief. That crossover is the whole point of SARAB.

Architecture is rarely just building. The UAE, in particular, has deliberately used architecture and cities to state who it is. Photographing that architecture as art rather than as product is a way of taking it seriously on its own terms. That is the lane SARAB works in, and it is a narrow one, because it asks for the technical command of commercial photography and the eye of an artist in the same frame.

See our case studies and commissioned architectural photography

Ahmad Alnaji

Ahmad Alnaji is a fine art architectural photographer based in Dubai and the founder of SARAB Art Production, a studio that specializes in fine art photography of landmark architecture across the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. He studied architecture for three years before moving into photography, and he reads a building the way its architect designed it, which is why architecture firms tend to recognize their own thinking in his images. He prefers the title of artist over photographer.

His work treats a building as a subject worth a story rather than a record of how it looks, bringing fine art to cityscape, architecture, and hospitality photography through visual storytelling. SARAB created the fine art images of the Museum of the Future that the museum and the UAE Government Media Office used in official promotion of the building, photographed Wasl Tower by UNStudio inside and out, One Za'abeel by Nikken Sekkei, and Zayed National Museum by Foster + Partners, and was commissioned by Qatar Tourism to photograph Qatar's landmarks. Clients include Foster + Partners, UNStudio, Killa Design, Saudi Aramco, Dubai Tourism, and Qatar Tourism.

https://www.sarab.art

The Difference Between Documenting a Building and Authoring an Image

Wasl Tower Photographed by SARAB | UNStudio's Dubai Landmark.