Editorial · 2026
Night Bakers
Three nights with the bakers at Al Khair Bakery in Satwa, from the first oven at 2am to the last van out at seven.
The commission
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Client
Fold magazine
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Year and place
2026, Satwa, Dubai
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The brief
A twelve-page photo essay and cover option for a food issue, shot over three nights in one working bakery.
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What was delivered
46 edited photographs, a cover option and captions written with the bakers, delivered nine days after the last night.
The story
Fold asked for a portrait of one bakery that could stand for all of them. Fadi Khoury has run his family’s bakery in Satwa for twenty-two years, baking khubz, manakeesh and rolls for half the cafeterias in the neighbourhood, and he agreed on one condition: nobody gets in the way of the ovens.
So for the first two nights I didn’t take a single picture. I swept, I carried trays, I learned when to stand back. By the third night the camera was just another thing in the room, and that’s when the pictures came: the flour hanging in the tungsten light, the first rack of rolls coming out at half four, Fadi’s nephew asleep on the flour sacks for ten minutes before the vans arrived.
Everything was shot in available light with two small cameras, no flash, so the bakery looks the way it feels at that hour. The story ran over twelve pages in Fold’s spring food issue, and two of the frames are now open-edition prints.
From the shoot
Tap any photograph to see it larger.
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Fadi Khoury, first batch of the night -
Sixty loaves a load, four loads a night -
The first rack out, rolls for the cafeterias -
The only break before the vans arrive
- nights on location
- 3
- pages in print
- 12
- photographs delivered
- 46
Juno spent two nights in the bakery before she lifted a camera. By the third, the bakers had forgotten she was there, and it shows in every frame.
More work
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