Originally posted by cung
To please Prince, I am back on the scene with another pic.
The kind of girl you could NOT afford ... poor small tooled guys ;-)
An outstanding photographic reportage from the Twenties and Thirties which brings back the memory of ways of living, ceremonies, adorned bodies of an Africa that can aptly be defined as ‘lost’.
These extraordinary, unpublished pictures, taken with great technical skill and with a sense of great dignity of the people portrayed, constitute a monument of the African continent as it was.
Kazimir Ostoja Zagourski (1880 – 1941) was the first professional photographer to travel throughout the interior of Congo and visited also the neighbouring countries, Tchad, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa.
During his long stay in Africa he took hundreds of pictures, 500 of which, divided in two series on different tribes, build up to a unique historic and ethnographic survey.
In a sense, Zagourski’s work constitutes the first ‘non-European’ look, devoid of the colonial overtones that characterise much contemporary work.
His forays into the depths of the African continent took him into the most remote villages of the Kuba, Mangbetu, Bwaka, Tutsi, Masai etc. where he took unprecedented pictures of great ethnographic interest.
He documented, for example, ceremonies (initiation, circumcision, excision, masks dances etc.), the great African creativity in body ornament (from scarification to hair dresses, from jewellery to lip plugs), clothes and all utilitarian objects places in their appropriate cultural context (musical instruments, shields, stools, knives, containers etc.)
An Ebook is now available with a part of his work exposed and the political and geographical background explained, but unfortunately it is written in French.
The ebook can be downloaded here :
http://users.skynet.be/HL-Editions/ebook/zag1load.htm
Make a tour here :
http://www.photogene.com
http://www.NikeBooks.com
