Mustafah Abdulaziz, born in 1986, New York City, is a photographer & director based between Berlin and London. For over thirteen years his work has focused on the human impact of climate change by bringing vital stories to the public through large-scale installations around the world.
He is the winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, a grantee of National Geographic, and a former fellow of the Alicia Patterson and Bertha Foundations. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, TIME, and Der Spiegel. His work has been acquired by the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection in Stuttgart, the permanent collection of Apple, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. His first short film, Women Are Beautiful, debuted in Berlin in 2025.
New York City, 2016
I get a lot of influences from cinema, mostly indirect, in the emotional atmosphere of a scene or the effect of things that lingers. It becomes interesting in the process of translation. Unrelated time and place can form the basis of new photograph — it’s not 1:1. It becomes interesting in the memories that bubbles to the surface when dream and myth collide. More and more these days I think the role of the photograph isn’t to front the viewer with resolution or a clear answer but to put them into a certain mindset where they have to consider opposites, or contradictions, or emotional places that mind dwells in when it asleep and avoids when it is awake. What this photograph is, steam room or performance, is the least interesting thing about it. What emotion it evokes is the most important.
Gleisdreieck, 2017
There’s always a tension in my work of what I’ve just made, or discovered in my archives, or what I aim to make clashes with what I feel comes next in my development. Some of the more interesting photographs of mine, at least the ones I prefer these days, are essentially indirect.
Summer rain on Arctic permafrost. Alaska, USA, 2022
One of the chapters of my work on climate change is series Arctic. This photograph comes from days of flying around the mountain ranges of the Arctic Circle in Alaska with my pilot Kirk. The summer rain would buffet our aircraft, smear windows with water, and the cockpit vibrated with this sort of throbbing mechanical lullaby. My mind drifted often to a feeling of smallness against the scale of the natural world, and I found that awe to be the perspective I would be looking for reflections of everywhere I went in the Arctic.
Nile River, Egypt, 2018
This is from another on-going long-term project, called Water, where I track human interaction and the changing climate through the resource water, across 13 years and dozens of countries. This comes from a long boat trip down the Nile, visiting marvelous ancient sites. I found myself placed in the consideration of the Egyptian kingdoms, their long reach through history, and how they drew me inward, slowed my mind, and made me dwell on what it means to feel time pass and slip away or pass and endure. It’s from these evenings of slow time that comes this photograph.
Sekéou, 2022
I don’t really own a personal camera. The one I used to like is broken in my desk drawer. And now I don’t take anything with me. I supposed having a camera on my body makes me sometimes feel a bit odd, like I need to use it. If a photograph needs to be made, there’s always a way with whatever is at hand. This photograph here is of a beautiful man, in the early morning hours of a rave, where my phone died and I borrowed someone else’s phone and made a portrait.
Alexandra Palace, 2023
Her character is in her style and her style is in her details. She’s pretty cool. Caught sight of her at a bus stop in the London rain. I suppose what I notice in others is often what I am, at some time or another, noticing in myself.
Uckermark, 2019
This is a photograph of a friend after a long night out, in the Uckermark outside Berlin. A lovely human being that I was just beginning to become friends with. I suppose what unites all these 3 portraits is an appreciation for the little beauties of a person I don’t really know. I like the small details that make a person feel convincing, that have real vulnerable facets, or just simply reveal aspects of their experience. These kind of portraits usually endure.
Water pump for 800 people. Osukputu, Nigeria, 2015
I’d been photographing my work on climate change for about 4 years by the time I arrived in northern Nigeria. At this time I was tracking the story of water scarcity amongst some of the world’s most remote and vulnerable demographics — across Africa, Asia, and South America. I’d focused so much on the lack of water in a lot of my stories. Maybe too much. This photograph was the first time I’d started to recognize and believe in the small victories of communities and people providing solutions and paths forward through sustainable and dignified solutions. I had a pretty bad back injury for some days, and was relying on a walking stick to get around, and remember getting to this village before sunrise because, for some reason, I felt the spirit of their dress, their meeting point, their conversation and atmosphere, needed an exposure with the rising sun.
Hurricane Michael aftermath. Mexico Beach, Florida, USA, 2018
This comes from a year-long fellowship I did with the Alicia Patterson Foundation in Washington D.C. to track the legacy of hurricanes in the American gulf coast states. I’d based myself out of one of my favorites cities, New Orleans, and spent months sifting through roads and coasts looking for these slivers of distorted and dystopian realities — where the ground becomes the sky, the inversion of class, the decimation of order, inconsistencies and human error, past and present.
Mercenary. Somalia, 2013
I really think there’s really no greater story than the one about humanity’s future. Sometimes it’s quite disheartening to see how we treat each other, treat our planet, treat our children’s inheritance. There is a tragic hubris to this time. I reckon history will be unkind and honest in showing how we reached the height of civilization and made such short-sighted and poor choices about how to handle our problems. This photograph is of a mercenary of some warlord in remote Somalia playing with his feet in the nominal shade of a dying tree outside an internally displace persons camp. It’s got some of that absurdity, some of that ego and violence, that pointlessness that 14 years of working on climate change around the world has shown me to be the binding, penultimate behavior of any civilization before the fall.
— Instagram: @mustafahabdulaziz — Website: www.mustafahabdulaziz.com
