The Mirdif villa where 200,000 photographs hold the UAE's story

DUBAI — Visitors who step through the door of Shaukat Ali Rana's villa in Mirdif quickly understand this is no ordinary home. Black-and-white photographs line the walls. Vintage cameras sit alongside film projectors, Polaroids and wooden field cameras. Glass cabinets hold yellowing newspapers, old passports, coins, stamps, driving licences and pre-Union border permits — the kind of paperwork most households threw away decades ago.

Yet Rana does not start the tour with any of it. He reaches instead for a framed photograph of Al Maqta Fort near Abu Dhabi — the first picture he ever took, more than half a century ago. It was the beginning of an archive that now runs to more than 200,000 photographs charting the UAE's journey from quiet desert towns to one of the world's fastest-growing nations.

“I never imagined it would become this big,” says the 66-year-old. “I simply wanted to preserve history.”

A Dubai of sand, seashells and ship horns

Rana arrived in 1968, aged eight, following his father, Mohammad Rafi Rana, who had come two years earlier to work at the British Bank of the Middle East before joining Pakistan International Airlines. The family settled first in Satwa, then Karama, where dunes still ran through much of the neighbourhood.

He remembers collecting seashells outside the house, date palms in every direction, and the horns of ships at Port Rashid carrying clear across the quiet city. His walk to Pakistan Islamia School in Oud Metha meant crossing stretches of sand each morning, as there were no proper roads along the way.

Evenings ran on television's limited hours — broadcasts began around six and ended by ten, with families gathering for the news. Weekends brought the challenge of tuning in to Hindi films broadcast from Kuwait, one brother stationed on the roof adjusting the antenna while the rest shouted directions from below.

Rana laughs that they rarely managed to watch a film all the way through.

Dubai's roundabouts, then planted with grass and fountains, doubled as the family's parks; his father would have everyone pack food from home for dinner there, and children played freely because so few cars passed.

The camera that started everything

Travel beyond Dubai was an expedition. The routes to Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah were largely sandy tracks, best attempted in a Land Cruiser. On one trip north, the driver stopped abruptly: seawater had washed over the track, and the family waited some 40 minutes for it to recede. A journey that takes about an hour today could then take three at minimum.

It was on one such drive to Abu Dhabi that his father handed him a simple roll camera and told him it was his. Rana was around 10. Photography was an expensive habit — a roll held only 12 frames, and between buying film, developing and printing, each picture cost roughly Dh2. “Every click mattered,” he says.

The first frame he used was Al Maqta Fort. He still has the print. “Today, when I look at it, I remember the journey more than the photograph itself.”

Learning the craft, from a Karama darkroom to Italy

Back home in Karama, Rana turned part of the house into a darkroom and taught himself to develop black-and-white film, with guidance from Shamshad, a friend of his father who worked with the late Sheikh Zayed at Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi.

Soon he was carrying his camera to school and offering classmates and teachers portraits for Dh5, developing the prints overnight and handing them over the next day — the earnings covering his film and chemicals. Some of those classmates are still in touch, and still have the pictures.

Colour was harder. In the 1970s, colour film had to be posted to the United Kingdom for processing, with prints taking around two months to return. Determined to master it himself, Rana spent two weeks in Italy learning colour processing from the equipment manufacturer Durst. “Everything was manual. You had to understand light, chemicals and colours,” he says. “Back then, photography was truly an art.”

In 1976 he took over the family shop on Yousef Baker Road in Deira, shifting it from cloth to photographic supplies — importing cameras, film, paper, chemicals and framing materials. That business grew into the Rafi Group, now run by his sons.

Photographing a nation as it rose

Even as the business grew, Rana kept documenting. His archive traces the construction of Sheikh Rashid Port, the first Dubai International Airport, the city's early tunnels, air shows, entire neighbourhoods and buildings long since vanished from the skyline.

He was also there for the first public celebrations of the Union in 1972, taken to Abu Dhabi by a father who sensed the moment mattered. “I was just a boy carrying a camera,” he says. “At that time, I didn't realise I was photographing history.”

More than photographs

The collection began with stamps, then coins, currency notes, documents and licences — anything he judged would one day become history. Among the items that most surprise visitors are the border permits issued before the UAE was formed, when travelling from Dubai to Abu Dhabi meant stopping at a checkpoint for exit papers and an entry permit.

There are telegrams that once took weeks to carry a message between countries, pagers, early mobile phones, old radios, newspapers, and letters from foreign embassies that helped him source equipment in the years before the internet. His father, he recalls, taught him to compress sentences because every word in a telegram cost money.

A way of giving back

Visitors now spend hours moving between the cabinets while Rana explains the story behind each object. For him the collection was never about the count. A childhood photograph, an old driving licence, a faded newspaper, a pre-Union permit — each is a fragment of the country's journey.

“I wanted to preserve history,” he says. “The UAE has given me everything. This is my way of giving something back.”