When Hussain AlMoosawi arrived home, he didn’t recognize anything.
The Emirati photographer, who had spent eight years studying in Australia, returned to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2013. He’d missed a real estate boom of dizzying proportions: not just new buildings, but new districts.
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More than that, the buildings of his childhood were disappearing, replaced by shiny new skyscrapers.
But for AlMoosawi, these international icons were not the urban fabric of his home: it was the oft-overlooked, mid-century office towers and residential blocks squeezed between new highways and overshadowed by luxury developments that felt most familiar.
It sparked a desire to “understand the urban context of the UAE,” and AlMoosawi set out to meticulously document and capture these underappreciated buildings, “and reimagine the city as if it were the ‘80s, the time when I was born.”
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Initially focusing on industrial landscapes, temporary structures and air conditioning units, he began to notice symmetry in many of the buildings he was photographing, inspiring his current project: facades.
“Facades are like a face,” said AlMoosawi. “It’s something that people connect with.”
His bold, geometric images strip away context to spotlight the character and diversity of everyday buildings. Using a telephoto lens to shoot close-ups from the ground or elevated positions, AlMoosawi carefully frames out distractions and sometimes removes minor obstructions like lampposts in post-processing.
So far, the 41-year-old, who is editor-in-chief for National Geographic AlArabiya Magazine, has photographed over 600 building?s across the UAE, and next year hopes to complete his collection in Abu Dhabi, where he lives.
In the long term, he hopes to turn the “lifetime project” into an interactive archive that both preserves urban heritage and invites viewers to rediscover their own city.
“Our cities aren’t big, in terms of scale, compared to many other cities,” said AlMoosawi. “But then they have a story to tell, they have things between the lines that we don’t see, and my quest is to see these things.”
