In photos: A photographer’s journey with the Palestinian Bedouin

The photographer found pain, purpose and peace at every turn of her three-year journey with nomadic desert families.

Slovakian photographer Petra Basnakova made a series of remarkable and personally transformative discoveries during her three-year-long journey among Palestinian Bedouin families. “This photography journey was a wakeup call for me because it completely transformed my personality,” Basnakova told CNN. “I’ve grown up and found my inner peace, and I started to appreciate things I didn’t before.” The resulting photobook, “Born of Sand and Sun,” was born of pure chance. On a trip with friends to the Nabi Musa shrine east of Jerusalem — part of her first trip outside of Europe — Basnakova diverged onto her own excursion deeper into the Judean Desert, known as El-Bariyah to her hosts, who prefer the desert’s Arabic name. Blanketed by an unfamiliar heat, she remembered sitting to rest her head on an oil stone, only to be awakened by a “miracle” — a Bedouin boy on a white donkey herding two black goats, signaling for her to follow him. Basnakova did so instinctively, she told CNN. In mere minutes, the initial gulf of differences between her and her desert guide — complexion, culture and language among them — was diminished by a mutual recognition of humanity, and an innate sense of wonder and adventure. “We embarked on a journey of trust, two strangers from different worlds, which led us to the most precious thing — family,” Basnakova wrote in her book. The familiarity with which Basnakova was embraced is a vibrant throughline in her monograph which shows shepherds gazing with pride at their flocks, fretting children clinging to the safety of their mothers’ garments, and mothers kneading dough with their daughters, passing onto them practices of an evanescing Bedouin lifestyle.