Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

Edited December 24, 2017 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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

[Flex Mentallo]

Suri women only usually paint their faces for weddings.

[Flex Mentallo]

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

[Flex Mentallo]

Nuba and Latuka - the color photographs

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

[Flex Mentallo]

They are not performing for the camera.

Edited December 24, 2017 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

I find them deeply moving.

[Flex Mentallo]

It is ironic that his beautiful photographs had to wait until this year to be republished after their rediscovery.

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

And so you see them differently.