Laura Jean Zito • Magnetic Sinai
MY CHANCE TO
to photograph the Sinai Bedouin is a
story of fascination meeting circumstances that dispelled my fear of the “other,” instilled
by inherited cultural messages. I discovered a photographer’s paradise, visually and
symbolically. I was a photographer in search of a subject. In the black forms gliding along
the shoreline that were the Bedouin women, their beauty hidden under uncanny amounts
of black robe, I found a great parallel to the apparent simplicity of the desert where it
meets the sea, the beige and the blue in endless expanse, belying a splendiferous quilt
of color beneath the sea’s surface in the myriad forms of the coral reef and its aquatic
visitors.
The Bedouin allowing me to photograph them was a huge leap of faith and trust. I found
photography a window through which meetings of the two mindsets of East and West
took place. Initially loathe to allow me any photography at all, resistance was replaced
by joy and gratitude in a priceless educational process, most obvious in the alchemic
experience of finding a picture of a loved one in my bag. Bringing the pictures back was
of course a highly integral part of the process.
26
March 2015