Most career stories have a wobble or two. Amr Allam's has a whole sequence of them. He began in dentistry, swerved into computer engineering, landed in architecture, picked up doodling along the way, and ended up as one of the more interesting architectural photographers working between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On paper it looks like a series of wrong turns. In practice, every one of them handed him something the next one needed.

As Amr puts it, there was never a grand plan; one thing simply led to another. So today we are following that trail: the quietly chaotic route, the projects he loves most, and an obsession that has absolutely nothing to do with buildings. Believe me, you will never guess what it is.

— You started in dentistry, moved to computer engineering and eventually ended up studying architecture. How did that happen?

— I never really planned to become an architect. I started university studying dentistry, but after one semester, I realised I was far more interested in computers and technology, so I moved into computer engineering. I was happy there, but at the same time, I was beginning to discover something else I had a real aptitude for: drawing.

One of my professors noticed it too and said, “You are very talented — you should think about architecture.” Until then, it had never really occurred to me. I simply didn’t know enough about the field to see it as an option. But his suggestion stayed with me, and eventually I decided to transfer again. This time, things seemed to fall into place. I enjoyed the subjects, they came naturally to me, and I felt I was finally in the right field.

In hindsight, perhaps the path wasn’t as unlikely as it seemed. I had always drawn and doodled; I had just never taken it seriously or thought it might lead somewhere. There was no grand plan behind any of it — one thing simply led to another.

— You mentioned doodling, and I remember you saying it became a big part of your creative life while you were still at university. How did it develop from random sketches into something more serious?

— It actually began with me being an overthinker. I was always scribbling, drawing random lines — almost as a way of clearing some of the noise in my head. Eventually, someone told me there was a name for what I was doing: doodling. That was when I started looking into it properly.

In the beginning, I would teach myself to draw a particular figure — a lion or a tiger, for example — sketch the outline and then fill it with lines and patterns. I never learnt it formally; I simply kept drawing, experimenting and gradually developed a visual language of my own.

Then, in 2014, Red Bull held a doodling competition. I wasn’t convinced I should enter, but my friends kept pushing me. I had absolutely no expectation of winning, so when they announced that I had come first, I genuinely thought there had been some sort of mistake. Everyone around me was celebrating and taking photographs, and I was still trying to process what had happened.

The win took me to Cape Town to represent Egypt, and that gave me the confidence to take my work further. I started entering other local competitions, running doodling workshops and using Instagram increasingly as a space for my art.

Then, in 2016, Starbucks approached me and actually asked why I hadn’t entered their competition. So I did — and ended up winning first place in the Middle East. This time, the challenge wasn’t simply about doodling; I had to work with the cup itself as part of the design. I received full marks from the judges, and that shifted something for me. I realised that perhaps it wasn’t only about being able to draw — I could take an idea and translate it into a design.

— So how did you go from doodling and architecture to architectural photography? Was there a particular turning point?

— I wouldn’t say I quit doodling to become a photographer. I was still working as an architect at the time, and doodling existed alongside that. There simply wasn’t much of a market for it in Egypt, so it never quite became a career in its own right. But it was where I first discovered my creative side. It taught me to think in terms of line, composition and perspective — things that later became just as important in photography. Even now, I tend to see everything through lines.

The real turning point came when those two sides of my work — architecture and doodling — came together. In 2019, I joined a team entering a competition connected to the Venice Biennale, where my role was to create a huge four-by-four-metre doodle as part of the project. We won first place in Egypt and travelled to Venice to represent the country with the Egyptian pavilion.

I spent a month in Italy, and that was when something shifted. I found myself constantly looking at buildings and photographing them, almost as if each one had become a destination in itself. I remember approaching a building and thinking, “I came to see you. Now I want to photograph you.” There was something about discovering architecture through a camera that completely drew me in, and that was when I began to realise photography might be more than just a passing interest.

I initially posted the photographs on Instagram simply to document the trip, with no thought of turning photography into a career. But once I was back in Egypt, something unexpected happened: people began approaching me to shoot their interiors. I kept explaining that I wasn’t a photographer — I didn’t even own a camera at that point — yet the response was always much the same: the equipment didn’t matter; they trusted my eye.

After the third or fourth request, it became difficult to dismiss as coincidence. I decided to give it a proper chance and bought my first camera, despite barely knowing how to use it. Two days later, I had my first paid interior shoot. It was a small, Airbnb-style project, but it gave me exactly what I needed at that stage: a real space, a real brief and the opportunity to learn as I went.

From there, things grew quite organically. Month by month, then year by year, I could see the photographs getting better, while the projects and clients became bigger. What had started with me wandering around Italy, photographing buildings simply because I loved them, gradually became my profession.

Today, I am stepping further away from practising architecture myself. I still love it, and people occasionally ask for my input on projects, but my work is now centred much more on architectural photography and filmmaking. In that sense, I never really left architecture — I just found another way to work with it.

— The way you tell your story, you seem quite hard on yourself. Am I reading that right?

— I am actually quite careful about where I take validation from. If my friends or family tell me, “You are very good,” of course I appreciate it, but they are my friends — they are going to support me. My mother thinks everything I do is brilliant.

What means much more is hearing it from someone whose work and experience I genuinely respect. If a photographer, designer or another creative I admire tells me something I have done is good, I take that seriously, because I know their opinion comes from a place of experience.

It is something I tell people in my photography workshops as well: don’t believe every compliment you receive. If everyone around you keeps telling you that you’re already great, it becomes very easy to stop questioning yourself — and once you stop questioning yourself, you can stop improving. You need encouragement, of course, but you also need to be selective about whose opinion you allow to shape the way you see your own work.

— When you photograph architecture, how much is planned and how much comes from simply exploring a place?

— It can go either way.

If there is a particular building I want to capture, I can be quite meticulous. I will research it beforehand, see how it has been photographed before, study the direction of the sun and work out when the light will be at its best. If I am especially interested in the project, I will even go and scout it first and sometimes return two or three times before I feel I have got what I came for.

But some of my favourite work comes from doing almost the opposite. I will pick a neighbourhood, arrive in the morning, grab a coffee and spend the day wandering with my camera, following whatever catches my eye. That is how my recent Jeddah series came about. There was no shot list or particular route — just a day of exploring — and the photographs ended up getting quite a lot of attention in Saudi Arabia.

I work this way in Egypt too, although wandering around with a camera there can be much trickier. In residential neighbourhoods especially, people aren’t always comfortable with it. The moment they see a professional camera, they start wondering what you are photographing — and quite often assume it might be them. With a phone, you can blend in much more easily; a camera immediately draws attention.

Tourist sites are much easier, although even there you get funny moments. Once, I was standing in front of the pyramids taking photographs when someone came over and asked what I was shooting. I remember thinking, “What do you think? I am photographing the pyramid. What else is there?” That probably sums up the experience quite well.

— Having photographed in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, what feels different — both architecturally and through your camera?

— Egypt is particularly strong when it comes to interior design. There is an incredibly talented generation of local designers, and the competition is intense, which keeps pushing the scene forward. Egypt also has an extraordinary architectural history, so there is no shortage of older buildings I want to photograph. What is less common, though, is large-scale contemporary architecture.

And that is exactly what I find in Saudi Arabia. There is an enormous amount being built, often on a scale I rarely encounter in Egypt, so I naturally find myself photographing far more exteriors there. At the same time, Saudi has this fascinating historical layer — from Diriyah in Riyadh to the old architecture of Jeddah, which I photographed recently.

Sometimes a building inspires me enough that having a client becomes almost irrelevant. I have paid for my own flights to Saudi Arabia, or travelled between cities there, simply because there was a particular project I wanted to photograph — no fee, no commission, nothing attached to it. I do it because I already know how happy I will be once I am there with my camera.

— One of your videos that attracted a lot of attention was of an incredibly narrow building in downtown Cairo. How did you come across it?

— Completely by accident. I was in downtown Cairo sorting out some paperwork and had some time to kill while I waited, so I went for a walk and stopped for a coffee or tea. That is when I noticed this building and immediately felt that something was off. From where I was standing, the proportions and perspective just didn’t seem to make sense.

So I walked around it to work out what I was actually looking at, and that was when I realised just how unusually narrow it was. I took a quick video because I wanted to look it up afterwards, although I never managed to find the original plans or much information about it. There was construction around the building at the time, so I couldn’t get particularly close either.

I actually deleted the video at first because, strangely enough, I didn’t find it that interesting myself. Then another account contacted me asking if they could post it, so I sent it over — and suddenly everyone else was fascinated by it.

There is another extremely narrow building, though this one is in Alexandria, close to my home. It attracted even more attention and was eventually featured by CNN Arabia. As an architect, I can’t say I particularly like it. As a photographer, though, it is difficult to resist. It is strange, slightly absurd and completely unique — exactly the sort of thing that makes you stop and look twice.

— Is there a building you have never been able to capture properly in a photograph?

— Definitely the Pyramids. I have thought about this a lot, and I think they are the perfect answer because no photograph has ever really done them justice.

They are only about 20 minutes from my home, so every couple of months I find myself going back, sometimes just to have a coffee and look at them. You would think that living so close would make them feel familiar, but somehow it doesn’t. Every time I stand there, I am shocked by their scale all over again.

And I have tried to capture that feeling. You can photograph them from the ground, fly a drone above them, shoot video, place people in the frame to give a sense of scale — but somehow the image always makes them smaller. The camera can record their proportions, but it can’t quite translate the feeling of standing beneath something so enormous and so old.

— Alongside your work as an architectural photographer, you also run photography workshops. What do you try to pass on to people?

— I have done around seven or eight workshops and photowalks so far, and there is one piece of advice I always come back to: don’t imitate someone else’s style simply because you admire their work.

It is very easy to discover a photographer you think is brilliant and gradually start seeing architecture through their eyes — borrowing their compositions, their editing, even the way they work with light. But eventually, you have to stop wondering how someone else would photograph a building and work out how you see it. Technique can be learnt; developing an eye that is distinctly your own takes longer. Ideally, your visual language becomes recognisable enough that someone can look at a photograph and know it is yours before they have even seen your name.

— And when you aren’t thinking about architecture, what are you completely obsessed with?

— Fighter jets, without question. I have been fascinated by them for as long as I can remember. I actually dreamt of becoming a fighter pilot myself, but for personal reasons that wasn’t possible, so photographing them became the next best thing.

I will sometimes travel somewhere without having any work there simply because I know I will get to see fighter jets. That probably tells you everything about the extent of the obsession.

Apparently, I have always been like this. After university, I once posted about my love of fighter jets, and someone messaged me with a memory from years earlier. Some jets had flown over our campus and, the moment I heard them, I ran straight out of the building to see them. I was almost a graduate, but apparently I behaved like a five-year-old.

And very little has changed. If I am lying in bed now and hear a fighter jet overhead, I will still get up immediately and run to the window. There aren’t many things that can bring back that kind of childlike excitement as an adult, but fighter jets still do it for me. And if I can photograph them too, even better.

— Back in 2017, you said Egypt’s art scene wasn’t always fair to talented artists. Do you still feel that way?

— I think if you would asked me in 2017, I would have said yes. What I meant was that talent alone didn’t necessarily translate into opportunities. You could be incredibly talented but largely invisible, while someone with half the talent and a much bigger following might get the job. Social media was very different then, too. Instagram was still about square posts; we weren’t yet living in a world where one video could suddenly put your work in front of millions of people.

Today, I see things differently. Artists have far more control over their own visibility. If you draw, design or photograph, you can pick up your phone, create something and put it out into the world. That doesn’t mean success comes overnight — you still have to develop your work, show it consistently and be smart about how you present it — but I don’t think we have quite the same excuses anymore.

I have seen that in my own career. A few years ago, before the Grand Egyptian Museum officially opened, I was meant to visit with some friends, but they all cancelled at the last minute, so I went alone. While I was there, I asked a girl to walk through the frame and filmed a seven- or eight-second clip. I posted it, and somehow it reached around 1.3 million views. That tiny video brought me followers and opportunities I could never have anticipated. The same thing happened while I was photographing a small apartment. The project itself wasn’t particularly significant, but the view caught my attention, so I took a few extra shots, worked on the light and editing, and posted them. Those reached around 1.4 million views. The important thing is to keep creating and putting your work out there without allowing the algorithm to turn you into a version of somebody else.