Many cultures do this including the ancient Greeks or Hawaiian islanders. The use of flowers and leaves and twigs as bodily decoration occurs primarily around the head and as a head covering or decoration, much like a crown of leaves. The people are beautiful in their innocent nakedness. The children devise creative head adornment from fruit, seeds, leaves, branches, seedpods, and even animal skins and horns.
Thus you see reds, yellows, white, brown, and grey.
These young people paint their faces and bodies with natural pigments derived from the soils and clay of the area. It is big, it is bright, and it is exotic but the images of the young people of the Omo Valley are incredibly unique visions of mankind and nature. This is not your typical coffee table book full of big bright exotic photographs. Hopefully this sort of attention will help ensure that the change is positive. 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. In a globalizing world, I can think of many types of attention from the outside world that would not be quite so benign. 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. But I do know it is up to the people being photographed to decide that. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.ĭoes photographing these people and the attention that ensues change them? Probably. 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. 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. 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. 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. The reviewer is concerned that this collection of photographs does not represent the daily lives and cultural practices of the people it represents. The sole review here trashing this beautiful book struck me as so unfair that I feel compelled to write a rebuttal. 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.
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