Wilfred Thesiger’s superb portraits of tribal peoples have earned him worldwide recognition as a photographer. Using a box camera which had belonged to his father, he began his photographic career in 1930, at the age of 20, during a short hunting trip in Ethiopia, and used the same camera to photograph hostile Danakil tribesmen when he returned three years later to explore the Awash river.

While in the Sudan, and now equipped with a Leica 35mm camera, Thesiger portrayed Muslim tribes in Northern Darfur, pagan Nuer in the Western Nile swamps and magnificent Nuba wrestlers. Among Ethiopia’s Danakil he had traveled as a European accompanied by servants, but here he lived on increasingly equal terms with his followers. His photography mirrors this changed attitude — rather than simply recording people, places and events, he began to select and compose his subjects more carefully.

The visual drama of Arabia’s deserts completed the development of Thesiger’s latent talent for portrai­ture. During his five years in Arabia (1945—50) he was able to depict his Bedu companions with the full sensitivity and power which his pre-war photographs had begun to suggest. Conceived in the harshest of settings, these Arabian pictures bear eloquent testi­mony to the inspirational effect the desert had upon Thesiger. In contrast, tranquil images of reeds, water­ways and lagoons characterize his matchless portraits of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq — in which he captures a world which has now completely disappeared. Between 1951 and 1965 Thesiger visited remote mountain areas in Kurdistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their striking inhabitants remained quite unselfconscious in front of the camera — as did the graceful tribespeople of northern Kenya and Tanzania whom he photographed some years later.

These unique portraits of Thesiger’s were all taken under exceptional conditions, often in particularly hostile environments. Together, they provide a magnificent pictorial record of diverse cultures and vanished worlds.