Aigul is a fine art and portrait photographer in Abu Dhabi who launched Aigul Captures in 2025 after completing professional photography training. In what she shared with GTN for this feature, she traces her visual instincts back much further than the business itself, to seven formative years spent in Italy after being born in Kazakhstan.
She runs her work under the handle @abudhabi.photographer on Instagram, which doubles as her portfolio, and says she doesn’t currently have a LinkedIn or TikTok presence separate from it.
What seven years in Italy actually taught her
Italy shaped her, in her own words, without her fully realising it at the time. She spent long stretches visiting museums and admiring architecture, absorbing a sense of composition, light and timeless design that later became the foundation of her photography, even though she wasn’t formally studying any of it. The camera itself came later, and from family: her sister, also a photographer, put one in her hands and effectively handed her a place to put everything she’d been quietly noticing for years.
Refusing to copy anyone else’s work
Early on, Aigul says she spent a lot of time comparing herself to other photographers and wondering if she was good enough. What changed that, in her account, was realising that success in this work doesn’t come from copying somebody else’s style. It comes from developing your own. That shift gave her the confidence to build a body of work that reflects her own eye rather than whatever look happens to be trending that month.
Photography, she says, is about people before it’s about equipment. Genuine relationships with clients create trust, and trust is what actually makes an honest portrait possible. Several of her clients have already returned for additional sessions, which she considers one of the clearest compliments the work can earn.
A photograph that travelled further than she has
One image from her portfolio has already been published in a magazine in Chile, a detail she brings up not to boast but as proof of the point she’s trying to make: a genuine style can travel on its own, without a name attached. That is the test she has set for the business as it grows. To become a photographer people recognise by style alone, images that someone keeps for years rather than scrolls past once.
Why Abu Dhabi is part of the pitch
Location is part of what makes the city work for her specifically. Sandstone landmarks like Qasr Al Watan and Al Hosn, the corniche, and the newer architecture rising around the capital all sit within a short drive of each other. For a one-person studio still building its name, that matters as much practically as it does aesthetically: a location shoot that would mean travel and permits somewhere else is often just a booking and a drive here, which keeps a session affordable without cutting into the quality of the images she’s trying to build a reputation on.
None of that removes the less photogenic part of running a solo studio: the editing hours, the scheduling, the slow months before referrals catch up. Aigul treats that as the cost of the version of the business she actually wants, small enough that every image still passes through her own hands before a client ever sees it.
Starting over in a new country
Aigul is direct about the fact that building a photography business from scratch after moving to Abu Dhabi wasn’t easy. She had to earn every client’s trust without an existing reputation in the city to lean on, and she describes the return clients she’s picked up along the way as the real proof the approach is working, more than any single booking or campaign. Part of what she’s building alongside the photography itself, in her own words, is simply a personal brand in a place she genuinely believes is one of the most photogenic cities in the world, a claim Abu Dhabi’s expanding cultural calendar gives her plenty of material to back up.
She is equally direct about what she still doesn’t have: no agency behind her, no second photographer covering for her when bookings pile up, and no marketing budget beyond word of mouth and her own Instagram. For a photographer whose whole pitch rests on a distinct, recognisable style, staying that small might be doing more work for the business than a bigger studio ever would. A booking at somewhere as recognisable as the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque still comes down, in the end, to one photographer behind one camera making the same judgement calls she always makes.
