Lusail Towers by Foster + Partners, Photographed by SARAB
Ahmad Alnaji and SARAB Art Production photographed Lusail Plaza Towers, the four Foster + Partners towers at the head of Lusail's boulevard in Qatar, and the resulting set is the reason Foster + Partners licensed the images of their own building. The towers are the most recent and the tallest iconic landmark of Qatar. And here is how we captured them:
The fine art architectural photography presents these towers from various perspectives. SARAB was commissioned by Qatar Tourism to photograph various landmarks in Qatar, and Lusail Towers were one of them, so we had an opportunity for aerial drone photography that gave us a unique view of my favorite architectural masterpiece in Qatar. And boy did I use this chance to the fullest! As you can see below, I managed to capture the towers from above at night, creating a magnificent visual. Foster designed the towers as a group that reads as one composition rather than four separate buildings.
One of my other favorite frames was during the 2022 World Cup, I shot the towers from the boulevard itself during a family walk, at the hour the avenue filled with people (mostly Brazilian fans) waiting for their country’s first appearance at Lusail Stadium at the far end. The towers do not move in that picture, but everything around them does, and the image is really about the city using the space the towers hold. One frame is the building as an object, ordered and drawn from above. The other is the building as a place, alive at street level. I wanted the set to carry both.
Between those two, I managed to create a collection so the towers read one way at first light, another one from the local park at midday, and another again once the boulevard comes up at night. I shot one image then framed through the line of Katara Towers, the other icon of Qatar, during our project for Qatar Tourism. Another shot mirrored off the water, and in black and white, when the form and the rare sunrays mattered more than the color, so that across the series there is more than one true picture of the same four towers.
A landmark this size deserves images that do it justice, so that when an architect, a developer, or a publication needs to show it, there is something worth using. Foster + Partners licensing the photographs of their own towers was the signal that the work cleared that bar, and that’s what matters to an artist the most.
There is a quieter point under all of it. The famous buildings get photographed endlessly. Part of what I want SARAB to do is to create a collection that stands out among the others. And I am thankful that this project earned that.
