Sky Frames

Sky Frames comprises a sequence of photographs taken through the hollow billboard structures that once punctuated Karachi’s skies. I began photographing these hoardings in 2009, drawn to the scale of their metal grids and the way they framed fragments of the sky and city. Empty, they seemed to mirror the perspectives of individual lives—each seeing only a slice of the picture, never the whole. Through these frames I watched the grey Karachi sky shift in colour, kites drift past, and sometimes vanish.

By 2015, however, Karachi had almost turned into a giant advertisement, its streets overtaken by billboards, many mounted on flawed structures that caused tragic accidents. In 2016, the Supreme Court banned outdoor advertising on public property, and the hoardings were removed. What remained were skeletal grids, abandoned along roadsides and vacant plots—silent witnesses to absence, change, and transformation.