mkd STUDIO creates commissioned editorial publications for places, brands and experiences with a story. Each publication combines photography, writing and design to document atmosphere, identity and the feeling of a place. The result is something made to last, whether held as a physical object, read in sequence, or returned to years later.
The instinct behind the work is consistent. What interests the studio is rarely the obvious photograph. It is the thing around it. The light before people arrived. The empty table after they had left. The details that explain a place better than its headline attraction ever could.
That way of looking shaped everything that followed.
Photography came before the studio. Growing up, family trips meant cameras. Film first, then early digital, pointed at whatever caught the eye from a window or a street corner. Zahra, my sister, was there for most of it. We learned to look in the same way, on the same journeys, with the same borrowed curiosity about what a place holds when you stop moving through it.
For a long time, the work existed without a client, a brief or a commercial outcome in mind. No campaign. No pressure for the images to become anything beyond a record of what had been noticed. The work existed because the subjects seemed to ask for it.
Over time, those photographs became an archive. Cities. Hotels. Fragrance houses. Sporting events. Coastlines. Gardens. Simply accumulated through repetition, returning to places, looking more carefully, learning that atmosphere is often built from things that seem insignificant when viewed individually.
Many of the studies began in exactly that way. A morning in Doha. A walk through Copenhagen. A quiet hour inside a hotel lobby. A circuit before the crowds arrived. None were assignments.
A single photograph can describe a moment. A publication has room to describe something larger. It can hold atmosphere, sequence and rhythm. That idea sits behind every publication the studio produces.
Today the studio creates commissioned editorial publications for places, brands and experiences. The archive remains independent and continues to grow alongside that work. In many ways it is still the same process it always was: paying attention to what gives a place its particular character.
Based in West Yorkshire. Working internationally.
The studio's approach is set out in the mkd STUDIO Framework. Collaborations explains how commissioned work comes together.
Umar Makda, Founder