"The King's Aeroplanes": an Aramco pilot in 1940s Saudi Arabia

Gove, Philip M. (photographer). [Photo album - Saudi Arabia].

€ 15.000,00

Two photograph albums compiled by an Arabian American Oil Company pilot, documenting the year 1946-47 on the oil fields of Dhahran and the period of King Ibn Saud's first official visit to his country's oil fields. While the pilot, Phil M. Gove, never had a chance to photograph the first king of Saudi Arabia directly, it appears likely that he often flew the king's retinue. He regularly snapped photos of "the King's men", "Two of the King's gards [!] standing by our plane awaiting orders from the King to take off", "King's Aeroplanes at Army Base Dhaharn", a scene on an airfield, with men, women, and soldiers milling around, captioned "Awaiting word from the King permitting us to leave Riyadh", and a similar tarmac scene showing two women in niqabs, one with an uncovered face, captioned, "How the women dressed in Arabia. One without vail [!] is an American Doc going to take care of King's wife". Ibn Saud's visit to the oil fields reportedly took place in January 1947, and was organized by Aramco.

For his other duties as an Aramco pilot, Gove visited - and thus photographed - Saudi Arabia widely from the air and from the ground, capturing a new country, and new oil industry, in its early decades. His snapshots show cities and oil camps as they were in the 1940s: Riyadh, Al-Khobar, Ras Tanura, Dhahran, Al-Kharj, and Dammam. He photographed Ibn Saud's palace at Al-Kharj, the oil pipelines from Dhahran to Al-Khobar and to Ras Tanura, and numerous shots of the petroleum industry: an oil tanker refueling off Ras Tanura, "Saudi Camp where Arabs live that work for the oil Co." complete with a mosque and very basic housing, a refinery, a distillation plant, and the burning off of unwanted gas in Dhahran.

Gove's photos are casual, clearly not snaps sold to tourists but those taken by a working pilot of his day-to-day life: infrastructure projects, the planes he flew (the "Desert Belle", a DC-3 that had to be dug out of a sandy runway, a B-17 "Flying Fortress" in its hangar, "later lost", and a C-64 Norseman apparently known to the pilots as "The Headache"), his American and Saudi friends, a few misadventures (a car stranded in the dunes outside Half Moon Bay), and interesting encounters with Saudi royal retinues.