A collection of eighty-nine full-color photographs from the widely-praised best-seller African Ceremonies offers images from across the African continent, capturing the traditions of rites of passages, including births, marriages, and deaths, along with seasonal rituals and religious ceremonies. Original. 20,000 first printing.
The author recounts ancient Maasai legends and songs, and powerfully describes the vivid ceremonies that mark the passages in Maasai life....Everyday tribal life and the ceremonial high points are photographed with a clarity and eye for drama that make Maasai a breathtaking experience.
If one picture is worth a thousand words, then the combination of text and images in Nomads of Niger adds up to the equivalent of a whole encyclopedia. The cover photograph alone tells you this will be a special journey; before you even reach the title page you've already been treated to several stunning portraits of a nomadic people known as the Wodaabe, "who number among the last nomads of Africa, indeed among the last nomads on earth." The landscape the Wodaabe inhabit is a harsh one: "In central Niger, between the great Sahara Desert and the grasslands, lies an immense steppe, scattered with scrawny bushes and skeletal trees. For nine months of the year hardly a drop of rain falls. The days are torrid, the nights sometimes freezing cold. And the harmattan, the hot wind out of the desert, blows up relentlessly, filling the air with a sandy haze." Across this no-man's land the Wodaabe herd their cattle, migrating north in the rainy season and south again in the dry months and leaving no trace of their travels as they go. Photographer Carol Beckwith spent 18 months traveling with one particular band of Wodaabe, and her photographs concentrate on the family of a herdsman named Mokao and his family. Nomads of Niger is more than just a coffee-table book; it is also an informative and highly entertaining account of the lives, customs, rituals, and taboos of the Wodaabe reminiscent of the best of National Geographic magazine.
The seminal volume on body painting and adornment by the world’s preeminent photographers of African culture. Following the international masterpiece Africa Adorned, Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher have focused on the traditions of body painting spanning the vastly unique cultures of the African continent. In a contemporary world so fascinated with tattoos and piercings, Beckwith and Fisher document the origins of these fashionable adornments as passed down through African tribal culture. Featured are portraits of the richly colored, detailed, and exquisite body paintings of the Surma, Karo, Maasai, Himba, and Hamar peoples, among others. Drawing from expeditions in the field and firsthand experiences with African peoples and cultures over the past thirty years and with more than 250 spectacular photographs, this is the definitive work on the expressiveness and imagination of African cultural painting of the human body.
An accessible single-volume edition of the previous two-volume work contains more than half of the photography from the original format as well as new images, in a work that celebrates vanishing cultural rituals and features an audio CD of African ceremonies.
