When Shaukat Ali Rana opens the front door of his villa in Mirdif to visitors, they quickly realise they have stepped into something far more than an ordinary home. Walls are lined with black-and-white photographs. Vintage cameras sit beside film projectors, Polaroids and wooden field cameras.
Glass cabinets display yellowing newspapers, old passports, pre-Union border permits, coins, stamps, driving licences and documents that many people would have discarded decades ago.
However, Rana does not begin the tour with any of these.
Instead, he walks to a framed black-and-white photograph of Al Maqta Fort near Abu Dhabi. “This was the first photograph I ever took,” he says picking up the frame with a smile.
More than five decades later, that image remains one of his most treasured possessions. It marked the beginning of a lifelong passion that would eventually grow into an archive of more than 200,000 photographs, documenting the UAE’s remarkable transformation from quiet desert towns to one of the world’s fastest-growing nations.
“I never imagined it would become this big,” said the 66-year-old. “I simply wanted to preserve history.”
Over nearly six decades, Rana has photographed the construction of Sheikh Rashid Port, the first Dubai International Airport, the city’s early tunnels, air shows, major buildings and countless neighbourhoods as they rose from the sand. He also photographed the first public celebrations marking the formation of the UAE, creating a visual record of moments that have now become part of the country’s history.
His collection, however, is about much more than photographs.
“I started collecting old stamps first. Then coins, currency notes, documents, licences and whatever I felt would become history one day. I realised that if nobody preserved these things, future generations would never know what life was like.”
For Rana, the journey began long before photography became his profession.
He arrived in Dubai in 1968 as an eight-year-old, following his father, Mohammad Rafi Rana, who had moved to the emirate two years earlier to work at the British Bank of the Middle East before later joining Pakistan International Airlines. Dubai was a very different place then.
The family first lived in Satwa before moving to Karama, where sand dunes stretched across much of the neighbourhood.
“There was sand everywhere,” said Rana. “We used to go outside and collect seashells. There were date palm trees all around, and every evening we could hear the horns of ships coming from Port Rashid. There wasn’t much traffic, so that sound of ship horns travelled all the way to Karama.”
His daily journey to school was nothing like what children experience today. Rana studied at Pakistan Islamia School in Oud Metha and walked there every morning across sandy paths.
“There were no proper roads where we walked,” he said. “We crossed piles of sand every day to reach school.”
Evenings moved at a slower pace back in the days. Television did not run around the clock, and families built their routines around its limited broadcast hours. “The TV started at six in the evening and closed around ten at night,” he recalled. “Everyone waited for the news before going to sleep.”
However, weekends brought another challenge. The family tried watching Hindi films broadcast from Kuwait, but getting a clear signal was rarely easy. “We had an antenna on the roof. One of my brothers would climb upstairs while we shouted from below, ‘Turn it left, now right, no, you have lost it again!’ I don’t think we ever watched a complete movie.”
Entertainment was simple, but those are the memories Rana treasures most. “There were many roundabouts in Dubai with green grass and beautiful fountains,” he said. “My father would ask everyone to pack food from home, and we would have dinner there. Those roundabouts were like parks for us. We children played freely because hardly any cars passed by.”
Travelling outside Dubai was an adventure in itself. Roads to Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah were largely sandy tracks, and ordinary cars often struggled to get through. “Family trips were usually made in a Land Cruiser or SUV’s only.”
One journey to Ras Al Khaimah remains fresh in his memory even today. “Our driver suddenly stopped. My father asked him what had happened. He pointed ahead and said seawater had covered the track. We had to wait for nearly 40 minutes until the water subsided, otherwise he couldn’t see the path.”
For today’s generation, a drive to Ras Al Khaimah takes little more than an hour. “Back then it could take a minimum of three hours, depending on the conditions,”
Those long drives also gave Rana one of the most important memories of his life. On one trip to Abu Dhabi, his father handed him a simple roll camera. “I was around 10 years old. He gave me the camera and said, ‘This is yours now.’”
It was a generous gift, but photography in those days was far from cheap. “The roll could take only 12 photographs. If you wasted one picture, it was gone. Then you had to buy another roll, pay to develop it and then pay again to print the photographs. Every print cost around Dh2, so every click mattered.”
The first picture he ever took was of Al Maqta Fort near Abu Dhabi. More than five decades later, he still has that photograph.
“I never thought it would become so special,” he says. “Today, when I look at it, I remember the journey more than the photograph itself.”
His fascination with photography only grew stronger. Back in Karama, Rana converted part of his home into a darkroom where he developed black-and-white films himself. His father later introduced him to a friend, Shamshad, who worked with the late Sheikh Zayed, Father of the Nation at Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi.
“He taught me everything about developing films and working in a darkroom,” said Rana.
“I travelled to Abu Dhabi to learn from him. Those lessons stayed with me for life.”
Photography soon became more than a hobby for Rana and he began carrying his camera to school and offered to photograph classmates and teachers.
“I used to ask them, ‘Do you want a photograph?’ I charged Dh5,” he said.
“Then I developed the pictures at home and gave them the next day. That money paid for my films and chemicals.”
Many of those classmates still keep in touch with him today, and so do some of the photographs he took of them as schoolchildren.
Colour photography was an even bigger challenge. “In the 1970s, we had to send colour films to the UK for processing. We packed the film carefully, posted it and waited nearly two months for the prints to come back.”
Determined to master the craft, Rana later travelled to Italy for two weeks to learn colour processing from photography equipment manufacturer Durst. “Photography was very different then. Everything was manual. You had to understand light, chemicals and colours. Today you press a button and the camera does everything. Back then, photography was truly an art.”
His passion eventually turned into a business. In 1976, after taking over a family shop on Yousef Baker Road in Deira, Rana shifted from the cloth trade to photography supplies. He began importing cameras, films, photographic paper, chemicals and picture-framing materials, laying the foundation for what later grew into the Rafi Group, which is now run by his sons.
Even while building the business, he never stopped documenting the UAE.
His archive includes photographs of the construction of Sheikh Rashid Port, Dubai International Airport, major tunnels, early air shows, traditional neighbourhoods and buildings that have long disappeared from the city’s skyline.
He also photographed the first public celebrations of the UAE’s Union in 1972. “My father knew something important was happening. He took us to Abu Dhabi for the celebrations. I was just a boy carrying a camera. At that time, I didn’t realise I was photographing history.”
Among the documents he treasures most are the border permits issued before the UAE was formed.
Before travelling from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, motorists had to stop at a checkpoint where officials issued exit papers from Dubai and entry permits for Abu Dhabi.
“I still have those documents. When people see them today, they are surprised that there was once a border between the emirates.”
The museum he has built over the years reflects not only the country’s transformation but also the changing way people lived.
Alongside thousands of photographs are telegrams that once took weeks to deliver messages across countries, pagers that later connected businesses, mobile phones, old radios, cameras, stamps, newspapers and even letters from foreign embassies that helped him source photography equipment before the internet existed.
“We wrote letters and waited one month for them to reach another country and another month for the reply,” he recalls. “If it was urgent, we sent a telegram. Every word cost money, so my father taught me how to shorten sentences.”
Today, visitors often spend hours exploring the collection inside his Mirdif home, moving from one cabinet to another while Rana patiently shares the story behind each item.
For him, however, the collection has never been about numbers.
Whether it is the first photograph he took as a child, an old driving licence, a faded newspaper or a border permit from before the Union, every item represents a small piece of the country’s journey.
“I wanted to preserve history. The UAE has given me everything. This is my way of giving something back.”
Source: Khaleej Times