 Here
there is a woman behind an iron grid and inside/outside there are dancing harem women. This turning the inside out, rendering the private public in regard
to women, is as theme which runs through many manifestations of Orientalism.
But here it is for traffic. In to out. An Orientalist paradigm. And there we have it again. Camels with their multi-coloured saddle cloths, just as in
biblical times, the Bedouin sitting sleepily at the edge of a dusty Arab village somewhere in Syria far from civilisation. Then we notice that we are
being shown the way to the local Ethnological Museum and, although we cannot know it from the photograph itself, the Bedouins are there to sell the tourists
camel rides. The village is Tadmor with the ruins
of Palmyra on its outskirts. These are to be seen in the background of another work in the series.
A modern woman, a tourist, sits reading a guide book. There is a certain wistfulness to the work. Perhaps, having dressed herself Syrian
style she is thinking If I was... The penultimate in the series is taken in Al-Arish, a town in north Sinai (Egypt). |
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 The
snooker player, with a slight smile on his face ruffles the surface of the Hopper-like, melancholic atmosphere. He is a Bedouin as his dress leads us
to believe but he no longer roams the desert. During the day he sells jewellery to tourists in a hotel from a ‘stand’ which is constructed
to approximate a Bedouin tent. No longer nomadic, he plays (for our sakes) at being one and plays open-air snooker in the desert night for his own amusement.
 The
final image defies any reading as a photo document - it is an impressionistic evocation of Oriental architecture and as such it signals the end of Orientalist
painting. Fantasy needs some detail to feed it and this is denied by the work. It provides nothing to hold on to. So just as Impressionism proved to
be the movement to supersede Orientalism towards the end of the 19th century, this photo acts as the end point for the series. But although the art
world moved on, the mind-set remained.
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