Agha Abbas

Born in 1969 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Agha Abbas has been in the media industry for the past 20 years and has extensive experience in Photography and Video Production. He writes: “When I started out there were no non-linear editing machines or LCD monitors on cameras and the closest thing one had to a portable flash drive was a 1.44Mb floppy disk. The technology has come a long way since. My love for the camera (and art in general), is not far from what should have been expected. My (Late) father, Agha Sadaruddin (RIP), was a Time and Life photographer, a documentary filmmaker par excellence and younger brother to the legendary Gulgee. My earliest memory is that of begging my father to let me agitate this tray filled with some ‘magic water’ (developer), in which dipping a plain piece of paper (after being exposed to a projected image from an Enlarger), resulted in an Image emerging on it. Sheer magic it was! It must have been such encounters that got me to fall for the art of photography at a very early age.”

 In his photographs for KB17, Agha Abbas calls forth multiple, layered stories of an industrialized landscape. Architecture is more than buildings alone. It is also the shadows they cast on the ground and on structures surrounding them, the ambient lights that play off their facades and windows, the scaffoldings and piles of discarded rebar that have yet to be removed from their building sites. It is the stories, mostly unheard, of the labourers who rise at dawn, travelling long distances to toil.