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Placing her hands gently on either side of her daughter's face, a Himba woman rolls down the thick brown coil of her ceremonial ekori headdress. Eyes closed in the darkness of their hut in northwestern Namibia, both mother and daughter register the gravity of this moment, shortly before the girl's wedding. The headdress insures that she looks only into the future that awaits her as a married woman and not grieve over leaving her family.
During courtship season in southwestern Ethiopia, a lanky Surma youth whose own body is covered with an intricate pattern from biceps to thighs uses all 10 fingers to drag wavy lines of white pigment over the belly of another boy scowling with concentration.
Intimate moments like these, sensitively captured in Passages by veteran photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, give Westerners an unusual feeling of kinship with rites of passage among African peoples in different parts of the continent. Even large-scale ritual scenes have a striking immediacy and a refreshing straightforwardness that emphasizes the human, rather than the exotic. These images are the result of long periods of contact between the photographers and their subjects, whose traditional celebrations offer only a few glimpses of the inroads of contemporary culture (T-shirts worn by men watching a funeral parade in Ghana, a Tuareg nomad's wire-rimmed sunglasses).
The 89 memorable images in this large-format paperback were selected from the 850 color photographs in the photographers' popular two-volume African Ceremonies. (They are also on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York through September 24, 2000.) --Cathy Curtis
Book Description
"A Magnificent documenting [of] the continent's rapidly vanishing kaleidoscope of tribal rites."
-Time magazine
"A visual feast. . . But even more impressive are the pictures from behind the scenes, in the more intimate events when ceremony comes to focus on a single moment in a human life."
-New York Times Book Review
Unanimous praise and sensational international sales greeted Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher's monumental two-volume African Ceremonies, published by Abrams in Fall 1999 and currently in its fourth printing. Now, this dazzling and affordable paperback presents 89 images from African Ceremonies, all of which will be exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, beginning in July 2000.
These dramatic, intimate photographs of authentic African rituals, spanning the entire continent-the distillation of 30 years of research and travel-provide what may be the world's last look at remarkable rites of passage from birth to death, including seasonal rituals, the power and drama of royal courts, and religious ceremonies. With text by the photographers, this "masterwork" (International Herald Tribune) is now accessible to a wider audience.
CAROL BECKWITH and ANGELA FISHER, who collaborated on Abrams' African Ark, have been photographing in Africa for 30 years. Beckwith grew up in Boston and is also co-author of Abrams' Maasai and Nomads of Niger. Australian-born Angela Fisher is the author of Abrams' Africa Adorned. Periodicals such as National Geographic, Time, LIFE, People, the New York Times, and many others have reported on their achievements and featured their photographs. Beckwith and Fisher lecture frequently. They both live in London when not traveling.
89 photographs in full color, 101/4 x 135/8"
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