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Life & Times

Wilfred Thesiger Web Gallery

The aim of this gallery is to introduce a selection of some 100 of Thesiger's less well-known images.

Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the distinguished explorer and travel writer, took some 38,000 photographs in over fifty years of travelling in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.  The total collection forms an unparalleled historical document of the regions in which he travelled and the peoples he encountered, and  it is now preserved in the Photograph Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Some of Thesiger’s photographs appeared in his famous books of travel writing, Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964), and more recently through books dedicated to his photography alone, such as Visions of a Nomad (1987). However, the published photographs represent only a small proportion of his enormous photographic output.

In December 2004 the Museum completed a year-long project to catalogue all of Thesiger’s photographs. As well as the 38,000 negatives, a majority of which were taken with one of two Leica 35mm cameras, there are 75 albums of prints, and further thousands of loose file prints. The three specialist cataloguers collated all the formats  and pieced together information about the photographs from a variety of sources: Thesiger’s own notes, his many publications, and the internal evidence within the photographs themselves. Each photograph has been described and indexed, peoples and places identified where possible, and dates and sequences established. The photographs have also been digitally scanned and printed for ease of access.

The project was funded by a generous donation from the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, former President of the United Arab Emirates. Thesiger’s photographs were initially deposited at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1993 as a permanent loan. On his death in August 2003, the collection was bequeathed to the Museum. In July 2004  the bequest of the collection was confirmed and, as an archive of national and international importance, it was accepted by H. M. Government as Art in Lieu of Inheritance Tax.