The first Arab photographer of Mecca

Ghaffar, Al-Sayyid Abd al-. [Praying around the Kaaba].

€ 4,800.00

Rare albumen photograph, produced by the first ever Arab photographer of the city of Mecca. Abd al-Ghaffar was the first resident of Mecca to photograph the holy sites among which he lived and worked, producing some of the earliest photographs of the Kaaba and the sights of the Hajj. He ranks alongside the likes of Ottoman-Egyptian engineer and photographer Mohammad Sadiq Bey (1822/32-1902) and the Dutch photographer Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), with whom he worked closely, as a pioneer photographer of not only Mecca, but of the holy sites of Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula.