Art Clark

As a young man in 1948, Shaikh Amin traveled from newly established Pakistan to accept a job in the storehouse of Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He had put away part of his salary, and within a few years of joining the oil company, he saved enough money to buy a Rolleicord twin-lens reflex camera. He enrolled in a photography course by correspondence from the US and began to pick up freelance jobs, and in 1965 he qualified for a trainee post with the company’s Photo Unit.

Time was that a picnic in any of Saudi Arabia’s deserts might turn up an ancient pot or other artifact. Since 2012 more than 100 people have given back thousands of informally gathered artifacts in a uniquely successful, goodwill-based antiquities preservation campaign.