Alain Cheneviere
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Alain Chenevière (1945–1999) was a French photographer, writer, and linguist who spent much of his life documenting traditional and endangered cultures around the globe. He held an "agrégation" in grammar and was a specialist in Sanskrit and Indo-European linguistics. Highly educated and fluent in nine languages, he combined a full academic career with an innate taste for adventure.
Chenevière built his reputation over some two decades traveling to remote corners of the world to photograph and study vanishing peoples. For some 20 years he lived among more than 200 primitive tribes as a Paris-based linguist, ethnologist, and photographer. His work chronicled a twenty-five-year journey into the lives of the few primitive tribes remaining in the world, from the jungles of Borneo to the mountains of Afghanistan, studying their history, customs, beliefs, and ways of life. This fieldwork resulted in a substantial body of illustrated travel and ethnographic books; he published seventeen photo albums in France with publishers such as Denoël, Hachette, and Nathan, as well as abroad with Doubleday and Mondadori. Titles associated with his name span subjects from the Himalayas and Burma to the Pacific, Mongolia, Iran, and Syria, often combining large-format color photography with his own travel narrative.
His volume on Syria, part of this larger body of illustrated cultural surveys, reflects the same approach that defined his career: pairing striking documentary photography with informed, first-hand commentary on history and place. Reviewers described him as an inveterate traveler whose lively and informative text introduced readers to countries drawing new visitors and admirers. Because his books were produced in relatively limited illustrated print runs and combine both authorship and photography by a recognized specialist in world cultures, his work retains appeal among collectors of travel literature and ethnographic photography.
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