According to Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, the pictures, many of which are collected in Before They Pass Away, a book selling for £100 or over £5,000 in a limited edition, are more akin to high fashion than reality. He says in an essay in online US magazine Truthout that Nelson’s “claim that it’s the ‘irreplaceable ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world’ is wrong – from pretty much every angle”. Corry adds that some of the pictures are “just a photographer’s fantasy, bearing little relationship either to how these people appear now, or how they’ve ever appeared. Of course, rendering people more exotic than they really are is a timeworn tradition.” “The images look like a throwback to a past era, but they’re also a contemporary invention,” writes Corry. ““His Waorani [the Waorani Indians of Ecuador] female models have now preserved their modesty by tying “fig” leaves into their waist string, which they would never have done formerly.” Corry also criticises the book’s description of the Dani of West Papua as a dreaded head-hunting tribe, without mentioning accusations of killings, torture and intimidation under Indonesian occupation.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 15:49:28 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015