Sohail Karmani

We have become accustomed to thinking about cities in terms of facts and figures. Sohail Karmani turns facts into faces, numbers into people – a cathartic act that allows us to get back in touch with the real concept of humanity. I like to think of his work not as his photography, but as his profound vision of a world that is slipping away from us. Sohail finds a way, through his photography, to have us stand as if in front of altars made of real glances, of living flesh, of dirty feet that magnify life. Sohail transports us to a planet that magnifies mankind in its true essence for generation 3.0, daughter of the pixels. His work becomes flesh to touch, hair to caress, faces to love. His mind possesses the tools to transform metaphysical into physical, exterior into interior, adventures of the body into adventures of the spirit. It is not us who are looking at his works. It is them who are looking at us. 
Mustafa Sabbagh, 2019
 
Born and raised in England, Londoner Sohail Karmani lives in Abu Dhabi, where he is a full-time professor on the New York University campus there. He has an academic background in applied linguistics and currently offers a writing seminar on “Power and Ethics in Photography”. Since 2014, he has been working on a portrait project in Pakistan, especially in Sahiwal, a city in the central-eastern region of Punjab. He was selected in 2016 for the second edition of the Master of Photography talent show. CNN ran an in-depth feature on his latest photo series, in which he documented the lives of the Gujarati fishermen of Abu Dhabi.