Ebook Just issued Vintage Africa (Photos - Casimir Zagourski)

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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 These extraordinary, unpublished pictures, taken with great technical skill and with a sense of great dignity of the people portrayed, constitute a monument of the African continent as it was.

Casimir 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. 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.)

-- cung (cung@ifrance.com), November 01, 2002