Documenting Design Doha Biennial 2024: From Exhibition Halls to a Book
Around 30 galleries and exhibitions made up Design Doha 2024, the inaugural design biennial staged across M7 in Msheireb, Doha's creative district. I photographed a large part of that program for Arab Design Now, the book published by Qatar Museums documenting the biennial's headline exhibition, curated by Rana Beiruti. Exhibition and museum photography is one of the most technical parts of my work as an architecture photographer in Doha, and this project covered nearly every kind of space that discipline involves.
Design Doha 2024 and Arab Design Now
Design Doha 2024 was Qatar Museums' first design biennial, and Arab Design Now was its headline exhibition, surveying local and regional design talent across architecture, furniture, craft, fashion, graphic, and object design from across the Levant, the Gulf, and North Africa. The exhibition later became a 360-page book, published by Qatar Museums with Silvana Editoriale, featuring a foreword by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, an introduction by Glenn Adamson, and essays by Rana Beiruti and Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop, profiling more than 70 designers.
Having photography included in a printed design publication of that scale, distributed internationally, sets a different bar than a typical portfolio shoot. Every image needed to hold up on the page, not just on a screen.
Photographing Around 30 Galleries and Installations
The scope of this project was unusual for architecture and interior photography: around 30 different galleries and exhibitions, spread across both indoor and outdoor installations at M7. Some pieces were static displays, others were interactive and immersive installations meant to be experienced by moving through or around them, which meant rethinking framing and composition gallery by gallery rather than applying one approach across the entire biennial.
Why Available Light Matters in Exhibition and Museum Photography
For this kind of project, available light and color accuracy are not optional details, they're the whole job. Museum and exhibition photography exists to document design work exactly as it was intended to be seen: the true color of a textile, the finish of a material, the tone of a painted wall. Introducing artificial light that shifts color temperature can misrepresent the piece itself, which is a much bigger problem in exhibition photography than in most other types of architecture photography.
Shooting with available light throughout Design Doha 2024 meant working around each gallery's existing lighting design rather than replacing it, and prioritizing color fidelity in post-production so that every piece, from woven textiles to printed graphic work, reads on the page the way it read in the room.
Working to the Curator's Brief
For several installations, Rana Beiruti provided specific shot requirements directly, including floor plans marking the exact angles and compositions needed for particular pieces. Working from a curator's brief like this is different from a typical architecture shoot: the goal isn't just a strong image, it's an image that matches a specific curatorial intention already defined before the camera comes out.
This kind of exhibition photography for cultural institutions in Doha and across the GCC region is some of the most demanding work I take on, and also some of the most rewarding, since the final images end up representing the work of dozens of designers, not just a single building or space.
If you're a museum, design institution, or cultural organization in Doha or the wider Gulf region working on an exhibition that needs this level of documentation, I'd love to talk about working together.
