By now everybody in the world is pretty familiar with Dubai’s insane pace of development, but 15-20 years ago this wasn’t such a well known fact. Those of us here for a long time have seen the place grow around us and we’ve all had to adapt to this growth in one way or another.
One of the additions that sounded pretty farfetched when I first heard about it was the digging of the Dubai Canal which was to make an island out of a massive section of Dubai (essentially the entire Bur Dubai and Downtown area). I remember walking on the Al Wasl Road bridge in 2016 wanting to photograph the canal while it still had no water, thinking it might make a good memory some day. Nine years later (almost to the minute), I went again to capture the canal, this time full of water and new buildings.
If you’re not familiar with my “Before and after” series of images, you can find them all here.