This workshop is now fully booked.

Set your alarms and join Zeashan and Shama as they explore Al Jaddaf beyond Jameel Arts Centre – starting at daybreak, we make our way under, over, and between the nooks of the Jaddaf Waterfront that are seemingly out of reach but always in sight. Together, we work towards reading between the more obvious sites of this newly developed waterfront property. Before the surrounding bustle of the Garhoud, Bur Dubai, and Umm Hurair localities pick up, we invite participants to use photography and site-writing as tools to observe the space in its stillness. The photowalk leads to an experimental image-making workshop using the photographs we have captured and the notes we have made that help us – literally and figuratively – study, dissect, and reconstruct our images and imaginaries of a space once familiar.

Zeashan Ashraf combines his love for documenting stories, understanding the complexity of personhood in this melting pot of urbanity, and connecting with people (just because) with his street photography. While he is primarily a people and music photographer, he enjoys turns to still life and street photography as a meditative practice.

Shama Nair is a photographer and writer drawn to the intersection between urbanity and visual culture. Through her work, she tries to foreground our spatial, temporal, and aesthetic relationship with an ever-expanding neoliberal metropolis.