Twenty Sixteen — AMIR SHARIFF: Photography

This website/blog was started in 2018 as a way to showcase and to focus my photography into one centralised place, away from other social media channels. One that I can call my own.

It has been thoroughly fulfilling to write these blogs and showcase my creative photography here. Photography has always been a way for me to take a short pause from the rest of the things happening in and around my day-to-day life.

I write these photo blogs mostly for myself, as a photographic journal of sorts, but I do hope you've been enjoying reading it and enjoying the images I have produced over the years.

The very first blog post was about my favourite photographs from 2017, and since then, it has been a recurring theme of mine to annually recap the previous year's best shots. Based solely on my very own point of view and my eclectic photographic vision. Then the rest of the blog posts are a little bit of everything that I enjoy taking pictures of.

Thinking about it recently, I realised that I have not shown anything on this website from before 2017. And since it's the year 2026, I thought, why not show some of my favourites from 2016! A whole decade ago!

A rare image of me on the blog. Riding at the back of a pickup truck in Pattani, Thailand. Trusty Fujifilm X100s around my neck.

Twenty sixteen was an immensely eventful and unforgettable year. I got married, moved to London, went back to school to do a master's programme, travelled to a few exotic locations, and made lots of new friends. A lot happened. Here’s a brief rundown…

Welcomed the new year in London as a year-end holiday and in preparation for the bigger move ahead. Went to Hong Kong with a bunch of international friends for a friend's wedding. Went to Kuching, Sarawak, for work, then to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, for a short break. Then I found myself in Southern Thailand, the Pattani region, for work. A very different place from the rest of Thailand. Then it was the end of March for my own big wedding, followed by a short trip to Koh Samui shortly after. All of that just in the first quarter of the year!

Then it was off to London officially, as my wife Halina got an amazing work assignment there that would keep us there for a couple of years. At the end of May, we went to visit a good friend from Malaysia who was posted in Paris - now, in 2026, he just moved with his family into the neighbourhood near us!

In July, we made it to Iceland! What a magical trip that was. I should post the pictures from that trip as a separate post here. Yes, I should.

One of the islands we sailed to from Split, Croatia.

In August we went sailing in Croatia! Six days sailing around little islands off the coast of Split. In October, we visited Lisbon, Portugal, for the first time and met some friends there. The end of the year brought us back to KL for another friend's wedding. Then we were off to Bangkok and then Phuket to close out the year. Yeah, a lot was done that year. And in between all that crazy travel was the whole agenda of discovering the streets of London, a lot of which I have posted here in several blog posts.

By twenty sixteen, I was about five years into doing this street photography thing as a serious hobby. This was also after a prior decade and more of just taking photographs for fun. At that point in 2016, I was still honing my street skills, perfecting my style, and still seeking a vision of what I think I want my "flavour" of photography to be. Upon further reflection... I am still tweaking this flavour profile of mine to this day, though. That never-ending pursuit of seeking that imperfect artistic perfection!

2016 Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate Britain.

In looking back when curating the collection of photos below, I now see a lot of what has continued throughout these years, what has come more into focus as "my style of street photography", and perhaps what I have dropped from my repertoire. All the little things that I tend to seek out on the streets, I can see bits of it now, looking back at these images from a decade ago.

There is no set theme for the images below; most of them are from the streets that I walked and travel shots I took that year. A random bunch of almost everything I think is of interest. All photos were taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and the Fujifilm X100S.

All those travel photos make me want to travel even more, but now with kids and family life, we have to pick and choose our moments; we can't just drop everything and head off to an exotic location as we did back then. All that being said, I still enjoy the brief moments that I get to study the streets of Kuala Lumpur.

I also did a few other travel and photo projects before this website came to life. I’ll check in on those and see how they fit into this website-blog narrative in the near future. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what you see here as I reminisce about that wonderful year.

Cheers.