Photographer Osama Bedaiwi Looks for the Extraordinary in Every Moment

Jeddah-based photographer Osama Bedaiwi’s journey behind the camera started thousands of kilometres away from the Kingdom he calls home, in Toronto’s trendiest downtown pocket of West Queen West. He would venture there with friends from architecture school to people watch, gaze at often obscure outfits, and wander block by block searching for the extraordinary in the every day.

That’s Playboy Carti with the fog machines. It went crazy and everyone was complaining about it but I used it to my benefit to set the atmosphere of the show.

“I’m very drawn to cinematic moments where everything is loud and chaotic and I want to capture one moment,” he tells SceneNowSaudi. His photos, evident of that philosophy, feel less like documentation and more like stills pulled from a film reel. A self-taught photographer, Bedaiwi would collect issues of Vice magazine and draw inspiration from the likes of Willian Eggleston and André Cartier-Varzon.

Here, I saw someone having a moment and I want to capture that. The colours are intentional, I’m very drawn to that aesthetic.

What distinguishes his images, however, is his perspective. Bedaiwi describes his approach as emotional, underground and experiential. It’s the kind of photography that watches the crowd as closely as the stage. By day, he works at a coffee shop, working to document daily occurrences of staff and customers while applying the same ideology. By night, he shoots for several clients, including MDLBEAST, capturing events and concerts among other things. When he heads out to shoot, he carries two cameras, one for the assignment, the other for himself.

Bedaiwi walked through his photography process and some of his stills with SceneNowSaudi, including those from a recent concert. He described the moments he saw and what he tried to capture within his imagery.