Befriending the Bedouin

Photographer Alan Keohane is devoted to the desert and its people

There is a strong inclination to view Alan Keohane as a modern-day Wilfred Thesiger, illuminating the deserts, traditions and people of the Arab world.

• In Pics: Desert and its people

But Thesiger, the soldier turned international explorer and writer, traversed Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq in addition to the Arabian Peninsula.

He worked in a different generation, and was often the first to visit many of the areas he wrote about as early as the 1940s.

He will always be one of those giants on whose shoulders followers like Keohane have stood.

Keohane, on the other hand, is primarily a photographer devoted to this land and these people.

He began working in the last few decades, when cars and other modern conveniences started to collide with traditional lifestyles.

He works internationally as an editorial and fashion photographer, but has made his home in rural Morocco after spending eight years travelling with first the Berbers and then the Bedouin for two books: The Berbers of Morocco and Bedouin: Nomads of the Desert.

Where Sir Thesiger's journey has ended, Keohane's is just beginning.

And judging by his exhibition currently under way at the One & Only Royal Mirage in Dubai, it has been a memorable ride so far.

"The people I have met, stayed with and briefly shared the lives of while working on the Bedouin project greatly changed the way I value life in general and the ambitions I set myself in my own life," Keohane told Weekend Review in an interview from Morocco last week.

"The Bedu convinced me that life is not about material or career success, not about one set of religious beliefs being more important or more true than another. Life is about being honourable in its most positive sense. Honour is about being generous, hospitable, kind and compassionate, not just to your friends but to whoever should pass in front of your home or cross your path."

"In the many journeys I have made, I have constantly been humbled by strangers' generosity and hospitality towards me," he said.

"It is a lesson I have tried to learn and an example that I have tried to emulate. I think if I had not been changed by the Bedu I met, then the whole project would have been a failure."

It is this sense of identification, of a deep personal relationship between Keohane and the people he records, that imbues his work with a warmth and intimacy rarely seen today.

Lifestyle details

The Dubai exhibition showcases the people of both deserts. Close-up portraits form its foundation, with the rest — a view from inside a tent, camels, dunes and other lifestyle details — adding context and environment.

"The show is about the people in the photos, about who they are," he said.

"Hopefully, when you look at the pictures you will see their pride, dignity and honour — the things that bind them, their desert bonds."

Critics have praised Keohane's portrait work as distinctive, with a subtlety and compassion that gives his subjects space to inhabit the photographs.

"A good portrait must almost have the effect as if a small finger comes out of the camera and taps you in the middle of the forehead," Keohane said.

"I look for the visual image each person projects, the image that I can see, that talks as loudly as if their photographic image could open its mouth and speak."

Keohane's visit to Dubai is timed to coincide with the launch of the paperback version of the Bedouin: Nomad of the Desert.

The full- colour book includes everything you would expect from a well-researched essay about the traditions, family structures and craft of the Bedouin culture, but its most memorable feature is the way Keohane animates both the mundane and exotic experiences from moving camp to watching young Bedouins look for their life partners.

The level of trust he has cultivated with the tribes lifts him from the role of observer to sensitive participant, and it is this shared sense of purpose that colours his words and pictures and lifts this book apart from the slew of Bedouin-themed offerings in the market.

And although the Bedouin seem in danger of losing their very existence in the face of an Arab culture in transition, as Keohane himself points out, it appears certain that he will remain their chronicler until that time comes.

"Here in the desert, I had found all that I had asked," Thesiger wrote. "I knew that I should never find it again."

That sentiment, like much else, finds its echo in Keohane.

"I love what I do, and I cannot imagine doing anything else," Keohane said.

"For me, it is a kind of celebration of life and the world. I find the people I photograph extraordinary, and I am constantly amazed that they could exist, that they are real, or that I could find myself in the circumstances where I have come to meet them."

"Photography is my way of capturing and expressing that wonder and at the same time being a witness to that person and that moment."

The Alan Keohane exhibition Desert Bonds will run until Wednesday, April 27, 2005 at the One & Only Royal Mirage Arabian Court in Dubai.

The exhibition, organised by Magrudy's bookshop, is open to the public.