Sohail Karmani

An intense photo album of everyday life in Sahiwal, a Punjab city, in Pakistan.

Sohail Karmani is a professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi, where he currently teaches Power and Ethics in Photography. However, he is also a passionate photographer who has developed his own storytelling language around people, travels, street life, and documentary photography.

Born into a family from Pakistan, he visited Sahiwal for the first time in 2010, the city of his father, located in the east-central district of Punjab. Sahiwal is better known as the site of the Ancient Civilisation of the Indus Valley (or Harappa civilisation), dating back to the third millennium BC. Overwhelmed by the colours, vibrations, and stories present in each corner, he created a photo album that pays tribute to the beauty, humanity, dignity, and resilient spirit of these people.

By avoiding all clichés that portray the East as the lost and forgotten or focus on suffering, this publication provides an up-close, and often intimate, look at Sahiwali society. The book captures fragments of daily life where faces blend with rituals, rites, and ceremonies in a land where the natural human condition remains partly intact.

The vibrant and contrasting colours, alongside the intense light, combine with a florid and genuine humanity, creating images that are highly engaging for viewers.