Frame and Focus

Ziyah Gafic was born in Sarajevo and grew up during the siege of the city. He briefly became a refugee in Italy before returning home, crawling through a tunnel under Sarajevo airport to his father, a fighter in the city’s resistance. His project “Quest for Identity” is a catalog of objects found in mass graves, a document of crimes, and validation and restitution of the individual lives of his neighbors and countrymen who were murdered by Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries before being buried anonymously in mass graves.

Ziyah is Director of The VII Foundation, Sarajevo and an award-winning photojournalist, author, TED speaker and contributor to National Geographic magazine. His photography focuses on societies locked in a perpetual cycle of violence and Muslim communities around the world. Over the past 25 years, he covered major events in the Middle East, Caucasus, Arabian peninsula, and Asia, and his work has received some of the most coveted prizes in photography from World Press Photo, Visa pour l’image, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Prince Claus Fund, National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Rola Khayyat is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator based in Doha, Qatar.

Through photography, film/video, installation, her socially-engaged projects explore new dimensions on the representation of war, memory, and identity.

Khayyat received an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Her projects have been shown at apexart, NY; the Black and White Gallery, NY; the Magnum Foundation, NY; Bronx Documentary Center, NY; Kunstraum llc, NY; the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Okk /raum 29, Berlin; Tacheles, Berlin; Catalyst Arts Belfast Photo Festival 2013; the 21st International Istanbul Art Fair; North of History, NY; and the JKC gallery, NJ.

Her work has been featured in The Nation, Contemporary Practices, L’oeil de la Photographie, The Public Source, Jadaliyya, JMEWS Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Yale Theater Duke Press, Warscapes, Mold, Esse, Musee Magazine, The Arab Weekly. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from VCUarts Richmond (Quest); VCUarts Qatar (FRG); apexart; Young Curators Academy; the Magnum Foundation, Civitella Ranieri; Artellewa, the Fire station Museum, PerForm Festival of Art, Ideas and Activations.

Khayyat is an Assistant Professor of Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. She previously taught at Columbia University, and the American University in Cairo (AUC).

Abdulla Faisal Al-Khalaf is a street photographer whose practice began in 2005. Known for his distinctive black-and-white photography, his work focuses on everyday life, capturing spontaneous moments that reveal subtle human stories.

Through a candid approach, he documents public spaces and social interactions, highlighting presence, movement, and shared experience.

Driven by timing and intuition, Al-Khalaf’s photography uncovers unexpected narratives within ordinary environments, offering quiet yet powerful reflections on contemporary daily life.

Presenting: Abdullatif Ahmad Alnaemi

Project Title: The First Chalk Line

Abdullatif Alnaemi is a Qatari photographer and traveler who occasionally works within a journalistic context. His work is driven by a simple intention: to show the world as he sees it through his lens.

Through his travels across different landscapes on land and underwater, he captures moments that reflect reality with clarity and honesty. His photography is not built on narration or interpretation, but on observation, presence, and timing.

Whether documenting environments, people or fleeting moments, Abdullatif focuses on creating images that feel direct and authentic. His work invites the viewer to experience places and moments as they are, without exaggeration, offering a personal yet grounded perspective of the world.

Project Statement:

"The First Chalk Line" is a photographic project that explores the roots of education in Qatar through memory, place and generational legacy. Inspired by historical accounts of early education dating back to the late 19th century and the beginnings of formal schooling in the 1950s, the project reflects on how learning evolved from modest kuttab schools and informal classrooms into a modern national educational system.

Through photographs of old schools, abandoned classrooms, silent corridors, archival traces and subtle signs of human presence, the work revisits spaces that once carried the daily rhythm of teaching and learning. Locations such as Al Numan School become visual reminders of generations who helped shape Qatar's educational and cultural identity during a formative period in the country's history.

The project also connects these early foundations to the generation that followed by including the photographer's father, whose experience as an educator represents a continuation of this educational memory and legacy. Rather than documenting history directly, the work approaches these spaces as emotional landscapes where silence, absence and memory continue to exist long after the voices within them have disappeared.

Using natural light, quiet atmospheres and restrained visual details, "The First Chalk Line" reflects on the relationship between education, memory and place, while paying tribute to the first generations of educators whose efforts contributed to shaping modern Qatar.

Presenting: Abdullatif Jaidah

Project Title: The House of God

Abdullatif Jaidah is a Qatari photographer whose work spans multiple genres, often focusing on landscape, cities and still life photography. He has participated in photography exhibitions in Doha with other local photographers. He studied International Business in Texas and Telecommunications in the U.K., and currently manages his family business.

Project Statement:

House of God is the name given to this photography project.

In Arabic, the place where Muslims pray is called Masjid, which is another word for prostration (Sujud). That is a key part of prayer, and where the faithful are nearest to their creator.

There are many other steps to complete a prayer. It starts with washing and performing the prayer according to the way it has been brought down over many centuries.

The mosque is also the place where people read the holy Quran and meet other faithful to socialize. It has an important place in Muslim daily life — to photograph life in the Masjid is to photograph where the faithful gather to pray.

Throughout human history, worship has played a key role in people's lives. For the faithful, a place to be with the creator, the Divine, is important. That is the main subject in most of these images.

People's attachment to the divine has always fascinated me — how it brings together every walk of life in one place, to be close together, healing and repairing many of the human stresses and hardships.

Hope is what makes us survive in this world, hoping that there is a just force that will ensure justice on earth, that heals and hears when we hurt. When we raise our hands in prayer, we will not be turned down nor return empty-handed.

My plan was to photograph two locations every day, but the war made that impossible. Instead, I focused on the places where I have prayed most often, where I feel most at ease. I had not originally intended to include images from my archive, but the circumstances of the war made that necessary.

Presenting: Alwaleed Alkhaja

Project Title: And This, Too, Shall Pass

Dr. Alwaleed Alkhaja serves as the head of open access and copyright at the Qatar National Library, directing its open access initiatives and copyright strategies. His professional background ranges from editorial roles at Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals to leadership in academic publishing at Hamad bin Khalifa University Press/QScience.com, Qatar's first open access publisher. Furthermore, he serves on the board of directors for Creative Commons. Alwaleed's advocacy for open science is deeply rooted in his own research background; he holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Max Planck International School of Molecular Biology in Göttingen, Germany.

As a Bahraini photographer based in Qatar, Alwaleed draws upon his scientific training in biochemistry and molecular biology to inform a highly experimental approach to photography. Documenting his family's everyday moments has enriched his appreciation for the intersection of memory, heritage, and visual culture. His technical practice is diverse, encompassing macro and infrared photography, cyanotype printing, and the construction of room-sized camera obscuras. Influenced by the Surrealist and Dada movements, his work explores abstraction to build new visual worlds — inviting viewers to look beyond the ordinary and question their perceptions of reality.

Project Statement:

Ramadan began in mid-February 2026, our first Ramadan in a new home. After more than 10 years in Al-Wakrah, we relocated to the north of Qatar, closer to work and to a different community. The change brought new routines: a different mosque, a new school for the children and new neighbors.

On Feb. 28, events beyond our control reached into our home. Over the next 40 days, I documented our daily life as we adjusted to uncertainty. The photographs record small shifts: Ramadan decorations, children at play, makeshift beds in our room and Garangao sweets arriving at the door instead of shared celebrations. There were anxious moments too: installing a water tank for water security, witnessing an epic thunderstorm that seemed to echo our emotions and finding solace in quiet, solitary moments.

The series is about waiting, about holding onto routine when the future is uncertain. As a father, I tried to show how we tried to create a sense of stability for our children while managing our own concerns and anxiety. Windows, sheer fabrics and shifting light form the visual rhythm of this series, tracing the delicate boundary between the life we protect inside and the reality waiting outside. Light filters through thin curtains to offer a fragile warmth, while glimpses of the local minaret and the community field anchor us to a suspended world. The photos observe how the domestic space absorbs the pressure of the unseen. The quiet corners and shifting shadows within our home become echoes of the broader, unspoken tension of the geopolitical landscape outside. While this series captures the everyday, it also suggests that something larger, just out of sight, is unfolding.

One day, I will look back on this chapter with the comfort of knowing it has passed, too.

Presenting: Burair Ali Alkishri

Project Title: The Rose

Burair AlKishri (born 1994) is an Omani photographer, creative director and visual storyteller whose work focuses on documenting the identity, culture, landscapes and life of Oman. His passion for photography began in 2013 through the Photography Society Group at Sultan Qaboos University, where he actively participated until 2017. During this period, he developed his visual language and strengthened his interest in human-centered storytelling and documentary-style imagery.

After completing his university journey, Burair began his professional career at OMQ Artistic Production as a videographer, working across various productions and visual campaigns. In 2020, he expanded his practice into commercial photography, building extensive experience in creating visual content for major companies, institutions and national projects across Oman. Since then, he has contributed to more than 350 commercial projects, combining artistic direction with technical and production expertise.

In 2023, Burair became creative director at OMQ, specializing in developing concepts, visual narratives, and artistic direction for the company's productions while leading the creative content team. In 2026, he advanced to the role of project manager, overseeing project organization, production workflows, timelines, and creative execution to ensure projects are delivered at a high artistic standard aligned with the values and vision of OMQ.

Alongside his commercial career, Burair maintains a strong personal connection to documentary photography and cultural preservation. His work reflects a deep appreciation for Oman and its people, with a particular interest in capturing the country's hidden details, traditional lifestyles, landscapes and human stories. Through photography, he seeks to preserve moments of authenticity and create visual narratives that connect memory, heritage, and identity across generations.

Project Statement:

This project documents the life of a humble man in Al Jabal Al Akhdar, Oman — a man whose face and hands carry the marks carved by time, while strength and vitality still remain present in the way he continues to practice what he loves.

Through the rose season, the project attempts to explore this deep relationship between people and nature, where roses are not merely an agricultural crop, but a genuine source of joy — bringing happiness to those who grow them, harvest them, smell their fragrance and even to those who simply observe them.

In Al Jabal Al Akhdar, at elevations ranging between 2,000 and 3,000 meters above sea level, where crops are cultivated along harsh mountain terraces, farmer Abdullah Saif Al Saqri experiences his annual moment with the rose season.

The lines shaped by time across his face and hands reflect a lifetime of struggle and labor within a demanding mountain environment over the course of his 71 years, during which he also witnessed the events of the Jebel Akhdar War between 1954 and 1959.

Between roses and hospitality, rose water becomes part of everyday life — even finding its way into Arabic coffee, where it adds a distinctive floral and smoky touch. Abdullah inherited the craft of rose water distillation from his father, continuing to use the traditional furnaces locally known as "Al Dahjan." Firewood is placed beneath distillation vessels containing Damask roses and water, beginning the process of extracting rose water through traditional methods passed down across generations.

The traces of time remain visible inside his storage room, where he preserves bottles from each year's rose water production. Among them is the oldest surviving bottle, dating back to 1980, stored in a whiskey bottle due to limited resources during that period. Beside these bottles hangs a portrait of the late Sultan Qaboos bin Said, creating a scene where personal memory and national memory coexist.

In another reflection of simple mountain life, Abdullah performs ablution using water from the valley beside his rose farm, carrying only his walking stick and sandals before heading to one of the oldest mosques in Al Jabal Al Akhdar. It appears that he may now be the mosque's only regular worshipper. Due to his age, he performs his prayers seated — a quiet moment reflecting simplicity, devotion and a deep connection to place.

Simplicity is also reflected in the daily lives of the mountain's residents, where rose-inspired patterns appear throughout household fabrics and bedding, becoming part of the visual identity of the region itself. The floral motifs and vibrant colors harmonize with the surrounding agricultural environment and the seasonal atmosphere associated with the rose harvest in Al Jabal Al Akhdar.

Tourism has also become an important element closely tied to the rose season. Signs of modern life emerge through specialty coffee cafés that serve beverages infused with locally produced rose products as part of the growing tourism experience in the mountains. At "Anah Café" in Al Ain Village, traditional Omani kumma caps hang above the coffee preparation area after being repurposed as decorative lighting elements, creating a visual blend between familiar symbols of Omani heritage and contemporary café design.

Meanwhile, "Dahjan Factory" has become one of the most prominent destinations connected to rose tourism in Al Jabal Al Akhdar. The space combines both traditional and modern rose water distillation methods while offering visitors an immersive experience centered around local products, mountain-view seating areas and traditional Omani hospitality. At the same time, a younger generation of mountain residents can be seen carrying this craft forward with seriousness and pride, ensuring the continuity of cultural traditions and rose heritage of Al Jabal Al Akhdar.

Presenting: Christophe Buffet

Project Title: Basateen Al-Freej (Gardens of the Neighborhood)

Based in Qatar, Christophe Buffet is a filmmaker and photographer whose life across Rotterdam, London, Paris and São Paulo informs a practice rooted in identity and migration. His award-winning film Stranger and photography published by Le Monde, Radio France and Folha de São Paulo explore culture, community and sustainable approaches to tackle climate change. Influenced by a career producing for museums, Christophe captures "masters at their craft" and those defying the odds. From Japanese organic farmers to Brazil's cultural energy, his documentary work highlights the human stories behind traditions, resilience and the universal spirit of creativity.

Project Statement:

In Qatar, the 2017 GCC Crisis thrust food security and autonomy into the limelight, catalyzing a surge in local agriculture. To showcase this shift, a temporary exhibition has installed an urban farm and community gardens on the grounds of a historic school in the heart of Doha.

The landscape is one of striking contrasts: broccoli and alfalfa fields sit against views of a traffic-heavy overpass, while eggplants and tomatoes overtake abandoned basketball courts. Between two rusty volleyball posts, a passion fruit tree weaves a new kind of net.

Within this large-scale experiment, two worlds collide. On one side, the industrial path focuses on output. Here, engineers and agricultural workers use conventional pesticides and nutrient-fed hydroponic systems to optimize the urban farm's yield. On the other side, the organic path focuses on connection. A group of gardening enthusiasts tames the desert soil through natural methods, growing flowers and vegetables to take home and cook with their families.

Through these two distinct methods, a former site of learning has been reborn as a living laboratory for a more self-sufficient desert city.

The temporary exhibition "Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave," currently occupying the Qatar Preparatory School (QPS) site, has been extended through the end of September.

Presenting: Fatema Ahmad Al-Doh (Fatema bint Ahmad)

Project Title: I, Myself, am a Country

Fatema bint Ahmad is a Qatari independent documentary photographer and a passionate traveler. Exploring unique and untold stories, she has been to 55 countries across different continents. She is interested in humanitarian stories, vanishing cultures, nomadic societies, remote tribes, minorities and indigenous people. The majority of her work is made up of series-based images that tell a story and create a feeling. Her work focuses on portraiture, negative space and details. She works with color, natural light, and the human element. Fatema conducts ethnographic expeditions and immerses herself in a particular environment by living there to experience daily life.

Project Statement

Starting in Lamu Island, Kenya, “I, Myself, Am A Country” explores the part of East Africa where Arabs migrated, centuries ago, on trade routes. The project explores themes of identity, belonging, coexistence and nostalgia. Moreover, it examines the formation of Swahili culture and the influence of Arab traders.

Presenting: Jaili Hajo

Project Title: We Too Have Wings

Jaili Hajo is a Sudanese visual artist and photographer working across photography and graphic design. Although he graduated as a dentist, he shifted toward visual storytelling.

Born in Khartoum, Sudan, he moved to Saudi Arabia at age 6, where he spent most of his childhood. After high school, he returned to Sudan for his bachelor's degree, when he began documenting everyday life and developing his photographic practice.

During the Sudanese revolution, he documented life on the ground. His project "Echoes of the Sit-In" was selected for Africa Foto Fair 2025 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

His work has recently been featured in "Printed Nostalgia" at the Fire Station in Doha and "Streets as Archives," a virtual exhibition by Unpublished Africa. He also participated in the Sudan Uprising exhibition, which has been shown in cities including New York, Sydney and Montreal.

Jaili is now based in Qatar, where he continues to develop his practice.

Project Statement:

As a child, I spent my holidays at my grandmother's home in a quiet rural town outside Khartoum. She raised pigeons, and I often watched them take flight, wondering how a bird could travel so far and still return before sunset. How did it always know the way back home?

I grew up far from my homeland, Sudan, yet returned often until I finally settled there for my university studies. For the first time, I felt a true sense of belonging. I witnessed the hope of the Sudanese revolution before it was met with brutal violence that claimed so many lives. The wound had barely begun to heal when war erupted, triggering one of the world's largest displacement crises and forcing me to leave with nothing but memories.

Photographing in Doha, this project reflects on displacement and the search for belonging. It asks: When does a place become home? Is home a structure, a memory or something we carry within us?

"We Too Have Wings" is an attempt to understand how identity reshapes itself after instability, and whether home is something we return to or something we learn to rebuild from the ashes.

The project brings together photographs made in Doha with archival images from Sudan and Saudi Arabia.

Presenting: Jhenny Marian Laya Perez

Project Title: FULAN

Jhenny Laya is a photographer based in Doha, Qatar, whose work explores the documentary recording of people, spaces and everyday experiences. Her practice combines documentary, event and editorial photography, focusing on human behavior and spontaneity across different cultural contexts. She holds a degree in Social Communication with a specialization in digital marketing and studied food photography at the Food Photography Academy. She has completed diplomas in lighting, documentary photography and fashion at CIEF in Caracas, Venezuela, as well as workshops at the National Center for Cinematography in Venezuela. She currently works independently on event and editorial projects such as Modo Stadia.

Project Statement:

"Fulan" follows Venezuelan families living in Qatar, exploring how cultural identities evolve and adapt outside the motherland within expatriate communities.

Photographed over the last year in Doha and surrounding areas, the series traces how these families preserve Venezuelan traditions through everyday objects, food, domestic rituals, and shared routines that sustain a sense of home despite geographic distance. Through intimate portraits, interior scenes, and still-life compositions of meals and personal belongings, the work reveals both continuity and transformation in daily life. It also highlights the emergence of Venezuelan-Qatari households, where two cultures intersect and coexist naturally, enriching one another within shared domestic spaces. Rather than framing identity as fixed, the series considers it fluid and evolving, shaped by migration, memory and adaptation. The work asks how cultural heritage is maintained, reinterpreted and reimagined in diaspora contexts, and what it means to construct belonging across borders while holding onto emotional ties to the country of origin.

Presenting: Jihad Hammoud

Project Title: Qatar As I Feel It

Jihad Hammoud is a Doha-based photographer whose work explores emotion, motion and abstraction within everyday life. His practice combines street photography and intuitive visual storytelling, focusing on fleeting moments, energy and human presence. He holds a BSc in International Business Management from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. He began photography in 2023, when curiosity turned into a deep personal passion. After the loss of his mother, photography became a form of healing and reflection, shaping the emotional depth of his work. Guided by instinct and honesty, he seeks to capture what is felt rather than what is seen, turning ordinary scenes into expressive visual fragments of memory and connection. His photographs have been featured in the Leica Fotografie International (LFI) gallery as Leica Master Shots, and he is a winner of Leica's "Best Photo" internal competition in Wetzlar, Germany.

Project Statement

"Qatar As I Feel It" explores emotion, motion and abstraction within everyday life in Qatar, seen through fleeting street moments and personal observation. Photographed over recent years as an ongoing personal journey, the series reflects how ordinary scenes can hold invisible layers of feeling, energy and human presence.

Rather than documenting reality in a traditional sense, the work focuses on how moments are felt rather than how they appear. Through street photography, abstract compositions and movement, the images break familiar environments into fragments of light, gesture and atmosphere.

The series is shaped by intuition and emotional response, allowing chance and imperfection to guide the frame. Each image becomes a reflection of connection — between people, space and memory — where meaning is not explained but sensed.

At its core, the work asks a simple question: what remains of a moment when it is reduced to feeling rather than form?

Presenting: Maja Bačić

Project Title: I SEA

Maja Bačić is a Croatian conservator and visual artist based in Doha, Qatar. She holds an MA in Conservation and Restoration from the University of Dubrovnik and works as a ceramics and glass conservator at the Museum of Islamic Art. Her daily encounters with historical objects shape her visual sensitivity and artistic practice. Influenced by her movement between countries, her work reflects themes of distance, memory and belonging, often capturing landscapes and fleeting moments in transit.

Project Statement:

This project is a photographic exploration of expatriate women living in Doha, Qatar, and the ways they create a sense of belonging in unfamiliar surroundings. It is a story of finding home in places that initially feel foreign, and of how perceptions of space evolve through memory, experience and expectation.

Two of the women are from Kenya, while the third is from Jordan, reflecting on her mother's hometown in Syria that is deeply tied to her childhood summers and sense of identity. Each of them has discovered a personal "anchoring space" in Doha, locations such as The Pearl, Al Wakrah or the Corniche, all situated by the sea. These coastal places hold unique meaning, becoming, in a way, extensions of home and offering a sense of grounding and continuity across geographies.

Together, we visited their chosen spaces and created their portraits. While each narrative is distinct, the series maintains visual coherence across the series, reflecting both individuality and shared experience.

The project documents lives and explores how space becomes emotionally charged through personal histories. It highlights the fluidity of belonging and the subtle ways landscapes transform into places of comfort and identity. The sea — also my point of origin — is a familiar presence that resonates with their stories.

Cyanotypes complement stories in an abstract, interpretive manner. This parallel body of work moves beyond literal representation, capturing memory and sensation through radically different visual forms.

Rather than strictly documenting others' experiences, cyanotype adds layered interpretation that blends perspectives.

The cyanotype backdrop shared is an AI-generated visual reference, intended only as an example of how the wall installation might appear. It is not a final design, but rather a conceptual guide to understanding the atmosphere and composition.

Presenting: Osama Abdallah (Osama Akood)

Project Title: Man to Man

Osama Akood is a young Doha-based photographer whose work explores cinematic elements in photography. His practice often combines real-life and fictional stories.

Project Statement:

"Man to Man" is a fictional exploration of isolation, perception and the destructive power of the human mind. The story is constructed by following a young musician who believes he has only three months to live. The work delves into the suffocating weight of a terminal diagnosis — only to reveal a far more tragic reality. It is a stark reminder of how easily we can lose ourselves to fear when left alone in the dark.

Presenting: Syed Hasan Iqbal Zaidi (Hasan Zaidi)

Project Title: Echoes on Stone: Rock Art of Balochistan

Hasan Zaidi is a Doha-based visual artist whose photography moves between the rhythm of the city and the intimacy of portraiture. Drawn to rooftops, shifting light and overlooked urban moments, his work transforms familiar skylines into cinematic narratives shaped by atmosphere and human presence. Blending fashion portraiture with documentary sensibilities, he explores themes of identity, movement and modern life in Qatar. His images have received recognition in award-winning photography contests and have established him within the local photography community for his distinctive visual language and elevated perspectives. He is currently developing long-term visual projects focused on urban memory and contemporary Gulf landscapes.

Project Statement:

The series, “Echoes on Stone,” is a reflection of my journey into the mountains of Balochistan, Pakistan — landscapes where silence, time and stone come together in a powerful dialogue. Through these images, I invite you to witness not only the form of the mountains, but the echoes they carry — of wind, of history and of quiet endurance.

Each photograph comes from moments spent within this vast terrain, where the land feels ancient and untouched, and every shape tells a story carved by nature itself. The aim was to capture the strength and silence of these landscapes, which remain largely untouched and offer a raw, authentic view of nature. I did not approach these places only to capture what I saw, but to listen to what the land reveals when you stay long enough to feel it.

The mountains of Balochistan are more than landscape; they are living records of time, strength and solitude. In "Echoes on Stone," I explore how these landscapes speak — softly yet powerfully — through texture, light and silence.

This is Balochistan, as I have experienced it — an echo written on stone.