M. A. Fakhroo is a Qatari photographer and filmmaker whose practice exists at the intersection of philosophy, memory, and cultural identity. For him, photography is not a tool but a limb — inseparable from his body, as essential as movement or breath. He first picked up a camera at the age of sixteen, unaware of the path it would set before him. What began as instinct soon became necessity: after enduring significant personal challenges, he returned to the lens with urgency. Photography, for Fakhroo, was no longer a pastime but survival, a way of thinking and enduring when language failed. Fakhroo later pursued a degree in Media and Cultural Production abroad, an experience that expanded his vision while also testing him. Immersed in media theory and sociology, he studied the works of Susan Sontag and others who challenged the meaning of images — as documents, as symbols, as wounds. Visits to art museums and encounters with new cultures opened his understanding of what photography could be: not only documentary or representation, but experiment, interrogation, even a mirror of the self. He learned that each culture is distinct, yet all are joined by the same need for belonging. At the same time, he recognized a striking absence — while so much attention is given to the image of “the other,” little was directed inward, toward the self and the local. This realization shaped his artistic purpose: to turn the camera onto his own world, his own heritage, his own present in flux. His work often explores the fragile balance between tradition and modernity in the Gulf. In one body of work, he photographs freej neighborhoods in transition, as older communal spaces give way to towers of glass and steel. In another, he stages objects — prayer beads, receipts, fast food wrappers, thobes — to question how consumerism and globalization are reshaping identity. Across these projects, his interest remains constant: what is preserved, what is commodified, and what is quietly lost. His images resist spectacle. They prefer silence, texture, and suggestion, leaving interpretation open but weighted. Travel further shaped Fakhroo’s practice. Through journeys to Cairo, Istanbul, Amman, Petra, and Wadi Rum, he absorbed perspectives across time and culture. These experiences widened his vision but also underscored the same question that defines his work: how does one belong in a place — or a culture — that is constantly changing? His answer is not fixed but ongoing, visible in the evolution of his images. For Fakhroo, photography is not representation but presence. It is how he speaks without being loud, how he carries ideas without forcing them. Many of his concepts are difficult to explain directly, but they can be shown: through the receipt-as-metaphor, the wall as memory, the object as witness. His photographs do not provide closure. They invite reflection. They are fragments of a larger conversation about consumerism, identity, and the experience of living in the Gulf today. Looking ahead, Fakhroo imagines his work not as a monument but as a trace — something that makes people pause, think, and feel. He does not want his images to dictate meaning, but to remain open-ended, “under the nose enough” to be accessible, yet ambiguous enough to provoke thought. If his work endures, he hopes it will be remembered simply as honest: the work of someone who thought deeply, who tried, who used photography as a way of interrogating reality and leaving behind memory.