8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
You can do a lot better with your money, April 19, 2005
This review is from: Sensual Africa (Hardcover)
My god, I can't believe anyone would pay $75 for this book! It's not really bad, it's just that there are so many better photo books on Africa (recommendation at end). I paid about $12 for it used, and actually took a moment to decide whether to keep it. (I kept it.)
Although each section of the book (covering Tanzania, the Cape Verde Islands and the Himba people of Namibia) has a one-page general description of the people, there is no text about the pictures. All we have to explain what we are seeing are scanty captions of two or three words, sometimes just a single word. The "black & white" (or brown & white, sort of sepia) pictures are on flat, off-white paper. Frankly they seemed too dark. If I were looking at them in Photoshop, I'd lighten them and then tweak the contrast.
The book opens with an "Interview with Peter Beard." We aren't told who he is (another photographer of the continent), but he treats us to, well, essentially a rant against the outside economic and political forces that are playing havoc on Africa. Some rants are true, and I don't think anyone would disagree with the basic premise of this one, but its angry tone doesn't mesh well with pictures said to portray "sensual Africa."
At first I was even more turned off by this interview, when I logically assumed (but incorrectly) that it was the photographer of the book in hand who was being interviewed. The interviewee (Beard) talks about regretting "even being in the medium of photography because it's true that I'm only interested in the subject matter. I'm not interested in photography. I'm not interested in illustrating or being a messenger-boy...." I later realized, to my relief, that the interviewee was not the photographer of this book. (The page doesn't make this clear, but we are given the names and should already know who's who, I suppose, if we bought the book and read past the title page.)
Overall, I didn't connect much with this book, not even as a person who has spent some time with African tribal people. To me, it seems little thought was given to conveying a sort of unified sense or impression--a message, or even just a story. Why does the woman oddly hold a small fish between her lips in the photo titled "Girl with fish in her mouth"? Why does the "Young woman" posing nude hold her hand over her privates as though she shed a garment for the picture but was self-conscious? This shot would be perfect for an American book of artsy nudes and require no explanation, but where she lives, nudity is probably not uncommon, so you'd like to have a little narrative. And why does the "fisherman with wooden cross" have a large fish head attached to it? There must be hundreds of stories, but none are shared with us.
Recommendation: If you are a devoted collector of books of this genre, or if you want a work specific to the people depicted, then include this one--it does have some nice pictures--but buy it at a used price. If you're not an avid collector, consider making another selection. For example, the black & white photos in "Bernatzik - Africa" (third in the Imago Mundi series) are truly stunning and far, far more interesting (taken in the Sudan and Portuguese Guinea). In addition to being better, the Bernatzik book has more than twice the number of pages, yet can be purchased new for less than half the price; plus it contains essays by 4 different writers, a bibliography and better, more descriptive captions.
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