ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the varied production and consumption of Naqab Bedouin photographs through an exploration of iconography and photography in six entangled visual economies. These contexts are organised by Bedouin ideals of closeness and distance, and the origins of foreign, non-Bedouin Palestinian, Israeli-Jewish, and local photographers. Here, the aesthetic, mainstream readings, and technological characteristics of Naqab Bedouin photographs are described. This chapter argues that while visual culture studies have examined photography’s imperialism and exoticisation of Bedouin peoples within Orientalist and nationalist paradigms, scholarship has yet to document members’ closer visual economies where ‘other histories’ are inscribed onto what are largely Western representations of their society for their own purposes in southern Israel.
