Collected here for the first time is a history of images of Oman, one of the most developed and stable countries in the Arab world and among the earliest adherents to Islam. A sultanate, the country sits along the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. From early days of world trade through the port of Muscat to contemporary engagement with international diplomacy and the West, Oman has always evoked beauty and mystery in equal measure. This art-house quality volume reveals an intimate picture of the country as its contours emerged over the last 80 years in the eyes of the West, as captured in images by English explorer Wilfred Thesiger in the 1940s and '50s, British Army major Charles Butt in the 1960s, and award-winning American documentary photographer Edward Grazda in the first decade of this new century.
About the Author: Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger (1910-2003) was a British explorer and travel writer born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Thesiger is best known for two travel books: Arabian Sands (1959), which recounts his travels in the Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the vanishing way of life of the Bedouins. The Marsh Arabs (1964) is an account of the Madan, the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. Thesiger took many photographs during his travels and donated his vast collection of 23,000 negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
Charles Butt served as a Major in the Sultan's Armed Forces from 1966-1978. He was initially Station Staff Officer administering 1,500 men. He then commanded the desert Advanced Base supporting operation forces on the hills and borders, before being transferred to the Gendarmerie, where he acted as Squadron Commander. He was promoted to Force Welfare Officer and subsequently became Deputy Joint Services Welfare Officer, Ministry of Defence. He was a keen amateur photographer (and member of the Royal Photographic Society) and took over 10,000 cover photographs while living and serving in the Middle East. These photos now form part of The Charles Butt Photographic Collection at the Middle East Center at St. Anthony's College.
Edward Grazda studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and has shot extensively throughout Latin America and Asia. Grazda's work has been collected by New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Art, among others. His images have also been published in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Double Take, Granta, and other prominent magazines. Grazda teaches photography at Harvard University and the International Center of Photography in New York. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony and the recipient of many awards.
Raina Sacks Blankenhorn is the executive vice president of the Institute for American Values and the founder of the Institute's Center for Global Engagement, where she serves as an editor of IjtihadReason.org, an online journal published in Arabic and English. Over the past decade she has developed and co-sponsored academic conferences and cultural projects with colleagues in both the United States and the Middle East. Blankenhorn, a published photographer, received her B.A. in American history from Harvard University. She lives with her husband and their three children in New York City.
