Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the distinguished explorer and travel writer, bequeathed his albums, prints and negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England. In December 2004, thanks to a grant from Sheikh Zayed ibn Sultan Al-Nahayan, the late president of the UAE, the museum completed a year-long project to catalogue all of Thesiger’s photographs. In over 50 years of traveling in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Thesiger had accumulated 38,000 negatives, 75 albums of prints and thousands of loose file prints.
Some of Thesiger’s photographs appeared in his famous books — “Arabian Sands,” “The Marsh Arabs,” “A Life in Pictures” and “A Vanished World,” among others. However, the published photographs represent only a small number of the images in the collection. The Thesiger collection forms an unparalleled historical document of the regions in which he traveled and the cultures he encountered.
The Pitt Rivers Museum has now brought some of those photographs online in the Wilfred Thesiger Web Gallery at www.prm.ox.ac.uk. The aim of this gallery is to introduce a selection of some 100 of Thesiger’s less well-known images. Through Jan. 15, The Pitt Rivers Museum is also hosting the exhibition, “Wilfred Thesiger’s Iraq 1949-1958.” This exhibition of over 50 photographs is a selection from the 4,500 he took in Iraq. The exhibition includes some of the classic images published in Thesiger’s books, but most will be seen in the exhibit for the first time.