WAASTAA

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘋𝘰 𝘍𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘉𝘦𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘥?
ماذا يترك الآباء خلفهم؟

For many, the answer is found in memories. For photographer Sadiq Y. Al-Harasi (Sadiq Y. Al-harasi), the search became a photographic journey. Tracing the outline of a father known more through memory than experience.

Drawing from family archives, cyanotypes, and landscapes marked by longing, he reflects on grief, inheritance, and the ways someone can continue to shape a life after they’re gone. Each image becomes part of an ongoing search for a man whose absence has never stopped being felt.

After losing his father at the age of eleven, Sadiq spent years trying to reconstruct the man he barely had the chance to know. With only a handful of family photographs, fragments of documents, and the stories carried by his mother, he began piecing together an archive of absence that explores not only who his father was, but how loss continues to shape identity long after someone is gone.

What Do Fathers Leave Behind? unfolds across two intertwined chapters. Archive is built from photographs and personal documents left behind by his father. Memory brings together landscapes, family histories, songs, and portraits that become vessels for remembrance. Together, they ask how we continue to know someone through what remains, and how grief quietly transforms into inheritance.

Rather than documenting a person, Sadiq photographs the spaces between memory and reality, revealing that fathers leave behind more than photographs or possessions. They leave gestures, stories, familiar faces reflected in their children, and lives that continue to echo across generations.

This Father’s Day, we reflect on the people who continue to shape us through the memories, stories, and traces they leave behind.

Works by mashael

‘Tenderness in many forms.’

‘A Way of Return’ a decade of work skye jones

‘Desert landscapes. The men who inhabit them. From the American Southwest to Bedouin roots in Saudi Arabia. doesn’t approach the desert as a singular place, she traces what binds them: grit, movement, labor, endurance. Arizona ranches. Bahraini cowboys. Communities stretched across the Middle East and the Americas. Horses move through it all, companions and symbols, carrying tradition, freedom, and the pull toward origin. No matter how far they travel, they always remember the path home.

Each image is hand-printed in the darkroom, the color heightened until the light, soil, and sky of distant worlds begin to echo one another.

For , this series is the return itself.’