Before the boom: Memories of Qatar's Bedouin tradition survive in a unique Danish exhibition

Before Qatar became a resource-rich oasis lined with skyscrapers and fancy shopping malls, the arid peninsula was inhabited by nomadic tribes that travelled across its golden sand dunes on camelback, herding livestock and sleeping in tents. 

Some of these tribes engaged in seasonal trade along the coastline, while others lived exclusively inland, with their livelihoods fully dependent on the vast desert. 

Although the Qatar National Museum in Doha holds many ancient Qatari relics and prides itself in displaying magnificent exhibitions on the country’s history and culture, the earliest images of Qatar’s Bedouin life are found in Denmark. 

Taken by female Danish photographer and filmmaker Jette Bang in 1959, a collection of portraits and footage for a 16-minute film called Beduiner, produced in 1962, show vivid aspects of everyday life in two Bedouin tribes that once traversed the Gulf deserts. 

Bang - famous for her photos of Greenland’s indigenous people - captured the images of Qatar’s nomads during a 1959 Danish archaeological expedition to the Gulf. 

During the visit, she spent three months documenting the lives of the Al-Na’im and Al-Murrah tribes along with ethnographer Klaus Ferdinand.

The film and an exquisite selection of portraits are currently on display at a temporary exhibition in the David Collection, a private museum in Copenhagen. 

But a wider collection of at least 1,200 photos from the trip have been conserved for decades at the Moesgaared Museum, a Danish institution dedicated to archaeology and ethnography from around the world. 

Astounding in their beauty and intimacy, the photos and film stand out as unparalleled according to Mariam al-Hammadi, professor at Qatar University and specialist in Qatari history, museums and culture. 

“This collection is the only documentation of Bedouin daily and family life. Nothing shows it so up-close and personal,” she says.

“Without them, we wouldn’t have a [visual] clue how people lived at the time,” she adds.

“We’d only have our ancestors’ oral histories, but no way to see Bedouin life.”

‘Rare and unprecedented’ 

On entering the gallery, is a coloured side portrait of a Bedouin woman, her black scarf and face-covering slightly raised to show a round-tipped nose and full lips.

Her face is embellished with a large gold nose ring, engraved in a sunlike pattern and adorned with turquoise at its centre, and her wrists decorated with a striking stack of silver bracelets. 

The photo gives a unique glimpse into the traditional aesthetic tastes of Bedouin women, and the splendour of their jewellery. 

Each subsequent portrait is more captivating than the next - the exhibition is neatly curated to provide every photo the attention it deserves. 

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In one corner, a group of portraits show Bedouin men in their glistening white thobe and ghutra - the traditional male dress and head covering. 

While some play with falcons, others display ornate daggers and swords. 

Individual portraits allow the observer to appreciate the men’s dark features. A young man trims his moustache, and another’s wife gathers the long strands of his thick hair into tidy weaves.

The images also show men going about daily activities, like playing with children, while surrounded by dogs or sipping Arabic coffee under a tent. 

Another corner focuses on children. In one scene, siblings huddle in a pose, while others show girls in bright orange and red dresses helping their mothers build tents and herd animals, and boys learning to train falcons with their fathers. 

According to exhibition curator Peter Wandel, Bang’s immense talent for getting up close to her subjects was part of a “revolutionary movement to documentary photography”.

“The photos show an aesthetic which many may not connect to a very basic way of life. They were living very [simply] and in remote areas, but still with so much beauty attached,” says Wandel. 

Describing the collection as “rare” and “unprecedented”, Scott Curtis, associate professor of communication at Northwestern University in Qatar, says: “The Bang photos and film were among the earliest and most thorough documentation of Bedouin life up to that time. 

“In addition to Bang’s obvious humanism and warmth toward the subjects of her photos, there is a methodological rigour in the selection of practices and people to be photographed.” 

Capturing a moment before transformation

Importantly, Wandel points out that the portraits were the last of their kind before life changed for ever in Qatar. 

“The photos were last-minute images before Bedouin life in Qatar was on its way for ever. Bang managed to capture the last minute of a vanishing culture,” he says, adding that Doha underwent significant change within a year or two.

Hammadi explains further: “What’s most important about the photos and film is timing. Up until this point, people still lived as nomads.

“The photos provide significant information about this lifestyle… especially that they had no means to document their lives, memories and struggles [before they] found themselves living in palaces and riding expensive cars,” she says. 

Within months of Bang’s visit, Qatar began to transform from an impoverished desert state into one with significant wealth. 

Modernisation was due to increasing revenues from oil and gas, which were discovered in the late 1930s but only began to generate substantial export earnings in the 1950s. 

Along with this shift in oil-generated income came independence from the British protectorate, a government settlement programme, and a desire for improved living standards. 

As Qatari society and economic life changed, the Bedouin population gradually abandoned their nomadic lifestyle in favour of settled urban housing and stable jobs. 

Women’s lives

Bang was not the first to photograph Qatar. European explorers who captured images of the Gulf peninsula included German Hermann Burchardt who travelled along the Ottoman route in 1904, and British diplomat Bertram Thomas who arrived in Doha after crossing Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter with Omani Sheikh Saleh bin Kalut in 1932. 

“Most of these [photos] are mid-distance shots of buildings, landscapes and men,” Sue-Ann Harding, professor in translation and intercultural studies at Queen’s University Belfast, tells Middle East Eye.  

“None of them have anything of the closeness, domesticity and interiority of Bang’s photographs,” she adds. 

“She provides us with a visual vocabulary of women’s lives never before captured on film.” 

'Many people assume Bedouin women had no say, but that’s untrue. They were always leaders and heads of their families'

- Professor Mariam al-Hammadi, Qatar University

And so, while Bang’s photos are not the earliest depictions of Qatar, they are the earliest and most personal of everyday Bedouin life, especially of the women. 

Vividly illustrating intimate moments from Bedouin women’s lives, one image shows a mother wearing the traditional face-covering and carrying an infant in the folds of her black abaya. 

Her facial expression barely shows, but her fortitude and resilience echoes through the image. 

Another image shows a tender moment between mother and child, with a woman sitting on the floor at the side of a hospital bed while her daughter receives treatment. 

The scenes portray women doing all the heavy lifting; from pitching tents, weaving textiles and riding camels, to tending to children and herding livestock. 

Men, meanwhile, sit back and drink coffee. 

“The collection documents the importance of the Bedouin women, not men. All the livelihood was built around women at the time,” says Hammadi, adding that the collection corrects inaccurate stereotypes. 

“Many people assume Bedouin women had no say, but that’s untrue. They were always leaders and heads of their families.”

The photos and accompanying film at the exhibition connect young Qataris, especially women, to their ancestors. 

Jawaher al-Naimi, a 35-year-old Qatari woman who hails from one of the two tribes photographed by Bang, says watching the film strengthened her bond with her grandmother. 

“The film is fascinating. It reminds me of my grandmother … who was the sole leader and provider of an entire household,” she says.

Naimi reminisces over her grandmother’s stories about “the early days” and recalled weekends at her old home in northern Qatar. 

“Watching these women climb down the camels’ necks, do all that labour work, [with] such physical strength is amazing. Everything she shared just came to life,” she adds.

“These remarkable women…embody strength and pure devotion. It brought me such a sense of pride.”

National identity 

The images from the exhibition are considered the most important surviving visual evidence of Qatar’s Bedouin culture before the gas boom and separate from the trade and pearling culture of the coast. 

While the Murrah were a purely a nomadic tribe that travelled wide and far across the desert - even into neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia, members of the Naim gradually came to live between the desert and the coast. 

For the Naim, like other Qatari tribes, winters were spent in the desert, with summers along the coast to trade produce with visiting merchants.

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According to Hammadi, all Qatari families hail from one of three groups: the hadar (urban), who lived along the coast and engaged in trade, pearling and fishing, but never experienced a nomadic lifestyle; the dual lifestyle, who spent their winters in the desert and returned to the coast in the summer for trade; and the nomads or “badu” who lived exclusively in the desert inland.

The National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) exhibits a film on the pearling industry, and a variety of interactive exhibitions about the dual lifestyle of early Qatari families but there is little on show about the communities that lived fully inland as nomadic tribes. 

“Even though we have all three groups in Qatar [urban, dual, and nomad], NMoQ opted to only display the dual community as the origin of Qatar’s communities, which isn’t accurate,” says Hammadi.

According to Hammadi, who was director of Qatar National Museum between 1999 and 2000, Klaus and his wife visited Doha and temporarily displayed a selection of the Bang photos at the old Qatar National Museum, but the portraits never won a permanent space in the now renovated and world-class national museum.

Nevertheless NMoQ displays a number of items excavated through successive archaeological expeditions in Qatar, including many from the one joined by Bang and Klaus. 

Wandel confirms that Qatar has had access to a digitalised copy of the photos since the early 2000s - so a future exhibition may still be on the cards.  

Jette Bang's Portrait of Qatar's Bedouins runs at the The David Collection in Copenhagen between 21 March 2025 and 4 January 2026