Preserving on Film the Natural and Cultural Heritage of Saudi Arabia

By Richard H. Curtiss

On first acquaintance it would be hard to find two Saudis seemingly more different than photographic collaborators Hamad Abdeli and Saleh Al-Azzaz. For starters, although Abdeli is a native son of Saudi Arabia, he does not wear the traditional robes and headdress. Sometimes he wears Western business suits in the busy offices and studios of his expanding photographic and graphic design business in Riyadh. More often he dresses much as he must have during the decade he studied fine arts and photography in Chicago and Michigan. Friendly, iconoclastic and fast-talking, he has returned to his homeland as fluent in English as in Arabic. But, unlike contemporaries who easily slip back into their traditional persona upon their return, Saleh Al-Azzaz brought back with him much of the Bohemian ambiance of art school and the can-do pragmatism that he obviously came to admire in the bustling American Midwest. Twice married, laid-back socially, and hard-driving professionally, he is a man who can do well in either world, and will.

By contrast, Saleh Al-Azzaz, a 35-year-old father of three, is Saudi-schooled, totally comfortable with his bedouin heritage, intelligent and cultivated enough to make a good living as a writer and magazine editor, and with energy and creativity to spare. Gravely friendly in his traditional kuffiya and robes and perfectly at home in the English he learned in Saudi Arabia, he speaks unhesitatingly about his childhood in a remote village in Qasim province which, in his words, was "completely cut off from the rest of the world."

His attraction to the world beyond began when relatives who had moved to Saudi Arabia's growing towns and cities returned every weekend with fresh bread wrapped in newspapers. He spent hours pouring over the photographs on the newspaper pages. Then, on the day his parents took him to a photographer's studio as a part of the procedure for enrolling in school, his life-long fascination with cameras began. Seeing his interest his father, a long-distance truck driver, brought him a plastic camera of his own. For weeks he took photographs of his friends, his family, his home, cows, camels, goats and the desert landscape, all without any understanding of how his one roll of film, which he used over and over, could be developed.

In high school he learned about films and developing while discovering also that he had a gift for writing. He applied for a job at a television station, volunteering to clean the cameras if there was no immediate opening for a cameraman. Noting his clean-cut features, grave demeanor and clear diction, the manager instead offered to make him a broadcaster. He was unable to convince the manager that he wanted to be behind, not in front of the cameras.

So, after completing university journalism courses, he became a journalist and, eventually, editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper. At present he is editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine of the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

It was in that capacity that his path crossed that of Hamad Abdeli who, only five years ago, could tell an inquiring newspaper reporter, "I'm the only professional photographer in Riyadh." Both men discovered that they shared a passion for preserving, on film, the rapidly changing heritage of Saudi Arabia. By then Abdeli had a staff of photographers to cover family occasions, openings of new buildings, exhibits or industries, and to prepare photographs for brochures and advertising. He still carried a camera himself, however, when he traveled outside Riyadh.

"I like to go to the desert and spend hours there clicking a small plant or something," he confesses. Similarly, Al-Azzaz, who by that time had learned a great deal about photography from Abdeli, headed nearly every weekend for the desert "to capture the past forever." The result of four years of such individual and collaborative photography is their book, Al Janadriyah: Aspects of Time, published in 1994 by one branch of Abdeli's graphics business, Abdeli Krome Publishing and Distribution.

Al Janadriya once was a lonely area where, every spring, the nomadic bedouin gathered to race camels. As the population of Riyadh, 45 kilometers to the west, increased, the late King Khaled lent the annual camel races his patronage, and soon Al Janadriyah became the major race course for the country, attracting competitors from throughout Saudi Arabia and neighboring states.

Since the accession of King Fahd to the Saudi throne, the annual event has been expanded to become a major festival reflecting the cultural heritage of Saudi Arabia. Now, under the patronage of Crown Prince Abdallah, commander of the Saudi National Guard, artists, craftsmen, performers and poets (particularly of the popular genre known as Nabatean poetry) rub shoulders with the traditional visitors to Al Janadriyah. The festival has become a cultural link for the new generation of Saudis to the traditions and values of their parents and grandparents in this dramatically changing land.

Those who remember the traditional Saudi Arabia of only three decades ago, and those who know it only as a land of burgeoning cities with wide boulevards and towering buildings of multi-colored tinted glass, will find in the pages of Al Janadriya the threads that connect both Saudi Arabias: its overwhelming and changeless landscape, its colorful crafts and occupations, and the expressive faces of its varied but always animated people. Some of those timeless faces, captured forever in the lenses of Salah Al-Azazz and Hamad Abdeli, are reprinted, with their permission, on pages 47 and 58 of this issue of the Washington Report. For information about copies in English or Arabic of their 192-page book, see the "Publishers' Page" on page 122.