Wahb Mabkhout

Milan, 1987.

Wahb arrived at Istituto Marangoni in 1985, a young man from Morocco, and graduated in 1987. There he learned to build an image. Not to take one — to build it. Light, cloth, posture, the half-second before a face resolves into an expression. That is the craft, and it has not changed in forty years.

The working years.

What followed was a career on both sides of the camera across four continents. Milan and Paris first. Then Cape Town, Dubai and Los Angeles — more than twenty-six years of it — shooting for Sports Illustrated, GQ, Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, and producing photography for Dolce & Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli, Gianfranco Ferré and Alberta Ferretti, and for Calvin Klein, shooting Kate Moss for WWD.

In Cape Town, in 2002, Wahb persuaded South African Cosmopolitan to shoot its annual lingerie special entirely on digital — the first fully digital editorial in South African publishing, on a camera that made six megapixels. Three years earlier he had co-authored Fashion Tribes with Monica Pollara, the first fashion photography book shot entirely on digital cameras, published before the first commercial professional DSLRs existed. It sold out in its first week.

Wahb has spent a career being early.

Dubai.

Five years in the Gulf, producing photography and film for the houses that built the modern city: Emaar, Damac, Dubai Properties and Jumeirah Group, and for Dubai’s most prominent retail destinations — Mall of the Emirates, Ibn Battuta Mall, Wafi Mall, BurJuman and Bin Hendi — with work delivered across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and internationally.

Hospitality and property demanded a discipline fashion never had to: a building has no expression to catch. You have to find the hour, the angle and the light that give it one.

Casablanca and Milan, now.

Wahb came home after forty-two years away, and brought the whole apparatus with him.

WAHB GLOBAL is what came of that — a corporate and commercial practice operating from Casablanca and Milan, serving hospitality groups, developers and professional firms internationally. The tools have changed enormously in recent years, and Wahb has moved with them. What has not changed is the thing underneath. Someone still has to decide where the light falls.