Flex Mentallo

I find them deeply moving.

They are not performing for the camera.

If Rodger was appalled at Riefenstahl's 'discovery' of the Nuba years later, his own photographs show a far deeper sensitivity, unadorned by any self-conscious intent to manipulate the subject matter.

George Rodger (19 March 1908 – 24 July 1995) was a British photojournalist noted for his work in Africa and for photographing the mass deaths at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War Rodger was one of many photographers to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the first being members of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit. His photographs of the survivors and piles of corpses were published in Life and Time magazines and were highly influential in showing the reality of the death camps. Rodger later recalled how, after spending several hours at the camp, he was appalled to realise that he had spent most of the time looking for graphically pleasing compositions of the piles of bodies lying among the trees and buildings. This traumatic experience led Rodger to conclude that he could not work as a war correspondent again. Leaving Life, he travelled throughout Africa and the Middle East, continuing to document these areas' wildlife and peoples.

But there are others who show us that it is possible to use photography as a powerful way of recording what the world - what humanity is losing, when sensitively and respectfully addressed, and give me reason to hope that it is yet possible to use photography in an ethical and humanistic way, without imposing one's own view.

Nuba and Latuka - the color photographs

And so this book becomes a case of conscience - my own.

Suri women only usually paint their faces for weddings.

“We do it for tourists because they ask us to, when the tourists leave we wash our faces and go to the town.”

In the pursuit of “photo money”, women pile pots, pans, horns and bushes on their heads; flowers are placed in mouths, stuck in ears and on the body.

When a photographer arrives, the Suri women, renowned for their ceramic and wooden lip plates, rush to collect face paint. Plastic bottles are put aside and T-shirts removed. Children form self conscious tableaus along the path, shimmying up trees to look dreamily into the distance.

And this entirely changes your perspective on these photos, doesn't it? You notice the slipshod application, the resentment in the eyes.

Yet ironically, while eroding the Suri’s culture, the government promote them as an “unspoilt tribe”. It is estimated the Suri receive fewer than 1,000 visitors a year, mostly photographers and filmmakers hoping for an “authentic” experience. In reality there is little authenticity in a visit to the most popular Suri villages.

To clear traditional grazing grounds for farming, the government has embarked on a policy of moving people into new model villages. This process is non-negotiable, and has come with many reports of human rights abuses. The Suri warriors are being turned into beggars, living on food hand-outs. No land allowance has been made for the Suri’s cattle herds, nor for subsistence agriculture. Without the cultural identity that land and livestock provides, the fabric of their pastoral society is being destroyed.

The fate of the Omo Valley was sealed in 2006 when the Ethiopian government began constructing the Pride of Ethiopia: the highly ambitious and controversial Gibe III hydroelectric dam. The dam allows for large-scale commercial farming through irrigated agriculture and has been described as a potential humanitarian disaster for the estimated 500,000 people who live along the Omo River, and around Lake Turkana.

The cultural heritage of Ethiopia’s Omo Valley and Kenya’s Lake Turkana basin has, until recently, been relatively untouched by globalisation. Thousands of years as a crossroads of human migration has resulted in a marked diversity. While modernisation is inevitable, in the Omo it appears to be at the expense of the locals rather than at their hands. The scars are visible in the hundreds of thousands of acres of bare earth waiting to be planted by multinational corporations, as subsistence agriculture is replaced by large-scale industrial farming.

The Lower Omo Valley is a spectacularly beautiful area with diverse ecosystems including grasslands, volcanic outcrops, and one of the few remaining ‘pristine’ riverine forests in semi-arid Africa which supports a wide variety of wildlife. The Bodi, Daasanach, Kara, Kwegu,, Mursi and Nyangatom live along the Omo and depend on it for their livelihood, having developed complex socio-economic and ecological practices intricately adapted to the harsh and often unpredictable conditions of the region’s semi-arid climate.

Peoples of The Omo Valley Here is a magnificent two volume boxed set that exemplifies the very worst of voyeuristic photography under the guise of an ethnographic approach.

Regardless, I remain just as fascinated by the body art of the Nuba as when I first saw these photographs so many years ago, and they have been the foundation of many art projects I've run in that time..

Riefenstahl's African photography is revealing, however, of a more profoundly disturbing feature characteristic of much modernist Western photographic practice, especially involving non-Westerners or any humans of less power. It can be of the humanist sort, which it mostly is these days-grand often color examples of their beauty, their potential contribution, their genius, or alternatively, their misery, their fall from grace, their victimhood, their loss-a resurrection of their totalities in distortions we have frequently seen, commonly after the physical destruction of them by the West.

Riefenstahl went to Washington to the National Geographic Society, where she was given a hero's reception. Among her admirers at this gathering were Louis Leakey and Jane Goodall. National Geographic had planned a large spread, and had the layout almost done, when they began to realize that they were going to be in the midst of controversy. By now Faris and Southeast Nuba ethnographer Oswald Iten had weighed in -and there was Susan Sontag (whose "Fascinating Fascism" piece on Riefenstahl had recently been published in The New York Review of Books) and others. The spread was cancelled.

Back to Munich, she quickly published the Southeast Nuba pictures in the London Sunday Times magazine supplement (12 October and 19 October 1975). The text was not hers, but a direct steal from Faris's own book published some years before, Nuba Personal Art from 1972. (It was Faris who established that the Nuba body art had no mythical purpose - it was purely aesthetic - in other words art.) She had initially claimed that she 'discovered' the Nuba by seeing them in a dream - but Faris's book clearly maps their location.

'Riefenstahl’s choice of photographic subject—this tribe and not another—expresses a very particular slant. She interprets the Nuba as a mystical people with an extraordinarily developed artistic sense (one of the few possessions which everyone owns is a lyre). They are all beautiful (Nuba men, Riefenstahl notes, “have an athletic build rare in any other African tribe”); although they have to work hard to survive in the unhospitable desert (they are cattle herders and hunters), she insists that their principal activity is ceremonial. The Last of the Nuba is about a primitivist ideal: a portrait of a people subsisting untouched by “civilization,” in a pure harmony with their environment.' (Susan Sontag)

She took little care in understanding the truth of what she photographed. A social dance that takes place about every two weeks in the dry season becomes "the great love festival held only once a year," and so on.

As a consequence of the publication of her photos and her constant publicity on her own behalf, tourists (principally German) were now flocking to the Southern Nuba and Southeastern Nuba. Local people started to demand money in exchange for their photographs, and Riefenstahl, of course, always the great artist, was indignant, and refused, denying local people at least a chance to earn something from this encounter. She paid instead, with beads and oil and ochre (which meant only the undressed got anything--indeed, people who visited her with clothing were turned away). This began to create great dissention locally, and her cameraman, Kettner, was once thrown down a well in Fungor, one of the Southeast Nuba villages. The young men were earning more money than anyone had ever seen before, and were using it, amongst other things to attempt to pay bridewealth instead of the traditional brideservice requirements. This irritated local elders mightily, as it denied them a source of labor for their daughters.