|
| Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa | 
 enlarge | Author: Hans Silvester
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $27.00
You Save: $18.00 (40%)
New (22) Used (4) from $23.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 69753
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 168
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 11.5 x 9.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0500543585
Dewey Decimal Number: 391.650963
EAN: 9780500543580
ASIN: 0500543585
Publication Date: April 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
An unprecedented series of images showing the Omo people's imaginative body decoration and embellishments.
The scene of tribal conflicts and guerrilla incursions, Ethiopia's Omo Valley is also home to fascinating rites and traditions that have survived for thousands of years. The nomadic peoples who inhabit this valley share a gift for body painting and elaborate adornments borrowed from nature, and Hans Silvester has captured the results in a series of photographs made over the course of numerous trips.
In this region of East Africa, the rivers that run through the dry savannas are home to abundant flowers, papyrus, and wild fruit trees, and this luxuriance becomes an invitation to creativity and spectacle. Within hand's reach, a multitude of plants inspire fanciful and ephemeral self-decoration, and the Omo react spontaneously: a leaf, root, seed pod, or flower is quickly transformed into an accessory. As in the West one might don a hat, people create caps from tufts of grass. As one would knot a tie or scarf, they ornament themselves with banana leaves or a stem laden with flowers. These decorations are embellished with butterfly wings, buffalo horns, boar's teeth, colorful feathers, and the like, and are further enhanced by body painting with pigments made from powdered stone, plants, berries, and river mud.
Here is a priceless record of a unique and increasingly fragile way of life, one threatened by conflict, climate change, and tourism. 160 color illustrations.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 pretty...ridiculous March 22, 2008
9 out of 15 found this review helpful
The sub title, "Decoration from Africa" is literally correct but substantially misleading. This is a book of sumptuous photographs of young and beautiful inhabitants of Ethiopia's Omo valley. There are essentially no pictures of day to day life or the true context of these people's lives. This book is not about daily life, nor does it pretend to be, but by describing its content as tribal decoration from Africa it promises something authentic. However, nearly everyone here is decked out in face and body paint and draped in a salad bar of lush leaves, sensual pods and pretty flowers. Are they decorating themselves out of some tribal tradition, or for the benefit of the potographer? Travel to southern Ethiopia has become very much easier in recent years. Small groups of intrepid tourists now visit the Omo frequently where as 20 years ago such visits were rare and arduous. Published images from the 80s will show villagers less flamboyantly made up. What appears to be happening is that a fashion show for foreigners is under way, much as what happened in the Nuba Hills of Sudan after Leni Reifenstahl published her famous photo essay hald a century ago. A more accurate title for this book would have been New Fashions: Tribal Children Decorate Themselves for Hans Silvester.
 Beauty does not need a context June 13, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I do not (yet) own this book, but I spent half an hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop recently in an absolute trance paging through it. The sole review here trashing this beautiful book struck me as so unfair that I feel compelled to write a rebuttal.
The reviewer is concerned that this collection of photographs does not represent the daily lives and cultural practices of the people it represents. That in fact the attention these people are getting from tourists and photographers is encouraging them to show off and thus changing their cultural practices from what they were in isolation. All that may be true. But none of it obscures or in any way detracts from the undeniable truth that these are some of the most beautiful, creative, and uniquely adorned people in the world. To page through this book is to be transported momentarily into a world of sensual beauty that few of us even dare to imagine exists. The viewer who is open minded enough to appreciate it is gifted with an insight into the beauty of a people he/she might not have known even existed. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.
Does photographing these people and the attention that ensues change them? Probably. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. But I do know it is up to the people being photographed to decide that. It is up to them to decide whether or not, and in what manner, they want to be photographed, not some outsider who believes their culture should be left intact. In a globalizing world, I can think of many types of attention from the outside world that would not be quite so benign. If it was done without compulsion, which appears to be the case, then I think that broadcasting the beauty of a people for the world to see is a good thing. Change is inevitable. Hopefully this sort of attention will help ensure that the change is positive.
Breathtaking June 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book transcends fashion. The inventiveness of those pictured is breathtaking. I showed it to a friend and it made him cry! It's that powerful.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
