Sohail Karmani: the Spirit Of Sahiwal

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. But he is also a passionate photographer who over time has elaborated his own storytelling language around people, travels, street life and documentary photography. Born into a family from Pakistan, in 2010 he visited for the first time Sahiwal, the city of his father, in the east-central district of Punjab, better known as the site of the Ancient Civilisation of the Indus Valley (or Harappa civilisation) and dating to the third millennium BC. Overwhelmed by the colours, vibrations and stories hidden in each corner, he created a photo album that aims to pay tribute to the beauty, humanity, dignity and extraordinary spirit of resilience of these people. Avoiding all clichés painfully attached to an idea of the East consisting in the lost and the forgotten or capitalising on the suffering of people, this publication offers an up-close, and in many cases intimate, look at Sahiwali society. Fragments of daily life in which faces intermingle with rituals, rites and ceremonies of a land whose natural human condition is still in part intact. The vibrant and contrasting colours and intense light blend with florid and genuine humanity, crystalized in images that are highly engaging for viewers.