Image of Peter Beard on the shores of Lake Turkana, 1965. From Guardian web site.
Controversial diarist, artist, photographer, writer, conservation activitist Peter Beard links my two worlds in New York City and Kenya. I always thought he was a Kenyan, a Kenya Cowboy to be sure but Kenyan none the less. Growing up, I remember his photography and the publicity it generated around wildlife conservation. The picture of him on the shores of Lake Rudolph (Lake Turkana to the kids) with half of his body in the mouth of a crocodile has always been part of my visual landscape.
In truth Peter Beard was born in these United States. He first developed an interest in Africa through visits to the Museum of Natural History in NYC. After graduating from Yale, he moved to Kenya working on game conservation, as documented in his book “The End of the Game“. The book featured the carcasses of mostly elephants that were dying in Tsavo from a combination of drought and overpopulation brought on by population pressures. Here in the US, Beard hung out with the art/social elite of NYC. Beard’s US base in Montauk (far east Long Island) was the place folks like Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Richard Avedon, and Jackie Kennedy spent time. He also counted luminaries like Mick and Bianca Jagger, as well as Francis Bacon among his circle of friends.
Excerpts from “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond”
Beard’s mixed media diaries and installations make use of a lot of the ephemera of Kenya’s past and present. From coins, to images of Presidents Kenyatta and Moi, from old photos of colonial Kenya to current images of the land, people and animals of Kenya, there is so much that that is part of my visual and cultural landscape. That his work was inspired by artists like Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, and his fashion images were featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair, places him squarely in the art scene in the New York of the 60s and 70s.
What one cannot deny about the work of Beard is that he appreciates the raw beauty of Kenya and incorporates it in his art. He can see the beauty of a Turkana woman untouched by modernity and say that it is the same beauty as that of a Vogue model. That bold viewpoint, informed by his life-long love of nature and natural history, challenges the connotation of Africa as that “dark” and primitive place and links the notion of beauty in Westernized, modernized, removed-from-nature New York with that of Africa (and all nature in general).
Beard, after all, is the man who introduced the world to one Iman Abdulmajid, claiming he had discovered her while she was herding camels in the Northern Frontier District (North Eastern Province to the kids). Iman’s arrival on the beauty scene of the early 1970’s completely and irrevocably upended the notion of African beauty in the world of fashion, which is pretty revolutionary come to think of it.
Paradoxically, apart from the Maasai and Turkana who live in the wild (in nature), the rest of us modern Africans are “doomed” for our wanton reproduction and desire for progress. In the debate over the battle of man vs nature in the competition for resources, Beard falls firmly on the side of nature. This quote from the film “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond” in the mid-90s seems to imply that diseases like AIDS are nature’s retribution for our profligacy:
“Coming to Kenya is coming to unspoiled, and unscrewed up by human beings (at least in the 50’s), … a frontier that extends right back in time to the Stone Age. Human beings are not going to stop, they don’t know when to stop. The only thing that can stop them are these diseases that everyone is spending all their money to fight. We are sucking the juices out of the earth to fight the diseases that nature wants us to have because we are too greedy and we have taken over too much.”
This is a position that is hard to abide considering that as post-colonial Africans we are free to screw up our environment (or not), without the moralizing of people whose ancestors destroyed their environment and big chunks of other peoples’ to boot. It is the romantic, outmoded “Out of Africa”-era fetishistic attraction to Africa the primordial and the repulsion at Africa the modern with its complex, intractable problems that makes it hard to have unalloyed admiration for Peter Beard’s art, as much as he has contributed ecologically, culturally and visually. However, I suspect that is the essence of the man, who while decrying the superficial nature of modernity, has no problem doing fashion shoots for magazines that embrace that same superficiality. The world is full of contradictions.
Trailer for the Waris Dirie biographical film “Desert Flower”
FILM: Desert Flower. Waris Dirie’s book of her escape from Somalia, rise to supermodel superstar-dom and later fight against female genital mutilation gets the Hollywood treatment. Ethiopian Liya Kebede stars.
Screenshot from Suresh Natarjan’s portfolio site on the Behance Network
“The BLK JKS homecoming slideshow” audio slide show from the Mail & Guardian site.
Music:BLK JKS are back in the States to tour in support of the debut album “After Robots” out now. Rolling Stone has called them “Africa’s best new band” and artists to watch in 2009. Here is a sampler track from their new album:
Photographers I Like: Speaking of BLK JKS, you’ve probably seen a tall gentleman on/back stage at their shows taking pics of the performances. Said gentleman would be Kwesi Abbensetts, an art photographer who beautifully captures the creative vibe of Brooklyn. He posts his work on the photoblog “Spaceship George“.
Photography, more:Mike Schreiber, Oroma Speaking of photographers, here as some cool images of Oroma Elewa the editor and creative force of nature behind the magazine/site pop’africana (which site I have been criminally silent about). Mike Schreiber is another Brooklyn-based photographer with great work, check out his esays on M.I.A. as well as other music portraits he has shot on his site.
Promise of Africa Collective at New York Fashion Week
FASHION: Speaking of fashion, herewith highlights from the Arise: Promise of Africa Collective Spring/Summer 2010 show at the recently completed New York Fashion Week. It featured togs by David Tlale, Eric Raisine, Tiffany Amber and Jewel by Lisa.
Sometimes the haircut can say a lot about the person. The cloud of
hair around someone’s head seems to be not only a hair style but a
type of manifest of a person’s “self”.
Recently I have decided to set up an ongoing photo project portraiting
Afro-headed people.
I placed an ad on the Internet and some of the people who responded
were invited to stand in front of my camera. The following portraits
display their individuality, style and character.
Screen shot from BBC News photo essay on Congolese migrants in South Africa
PHOTO ESSAY: Congolese migrants in South Africa staged a La Sape fashion show as a way to increase understanding between their community and their Johannesburg hosts in the wake of the deadly violence against immigrants there in 2008.
Fataumata Cissé wears a Junya Watanabe multicolored top and green plaid skirt. Miu Miu bag. Zoraide shoes. Mamadou Gamara wears a Dsquared2 blue-and-white striped shirt. Missoni multicolored vest and pale blue pants. Gucci shoes. Mariam Sidibé wears a Nicole Miller multicolored dress. Tsumori Chisato multicolored wrap-skirt. Christian Louboutin shoes. Albertus Swanepoel hat. Dries Van Noten necklace.
Photo: Malick Sidibé for The New York Times
Screen shot of Earth Wind and Fire performance from WNET site
First half of a January 1973 show from the SOUL! series entitled “Elements” features a performance by soul/jazz/funk-playing Earth Wind And Fire. Cool: the song “Mom” from the album “Last Days and Time”. Also cool: Verdine White’s Hendrix-esque bass solo (talk about slapping the bass!) Check out Philip Bailey’s pan-African red, green black outfit (yikes!) and all the fly outfits in the audience. In secondary school you could tell my exercise books and geometry kits; they were the ones with the Egyptian symbols on them (the ankh featured prominently) copied from EWF album artwork.
The second half of the show features Broadway star Linda Hopkins and the Soul Quintet (featuring a young Mtume). This is absolute soul gold.
Description of SOUL! from the WNET web site the New York City PBS station which aired the series from 1968 to 1973:
This entertainment-variety-talk show was not only a vehicle to promote African-American artistry, community and culture, but also a platform for political expression and the fight for social justice. It showcased classic live musical performances from funk, soul, jazz, and world musicians, and had in-depth, extraordinary interviews with political, sports, literary figures and more. It was the first program on WNET to be recorded with the then-new technology of videotape, and most of the shows were recorded in real-time—not live, but unedited.
In the 2009 spring season, African style is a drumbeat through the clothes and accessories. Surprisingly it isn’t about the ethnic. Instead, it is the sculpted geometric shapes of Africa and its rich spicy colors that are the strongest forms of identity.
Freddie Gwala: After completing a jail sentence for car theft, Freddie Gwala embarked on a successful international musical career in the 90’s; his personal style/street cred made him a pantsula icon. [via Throwing Shade]
Pantsula?:
Pantsula is a South African township dance form that emerged in the ’50s. It represents a way of life, dress and speech (tsotsitaal) and is considered symbolic of township culture.
In art-world circles, Fosso is often spoken of as Central Africa’s answer to Cindy Sherman. But Sherman’s art evolved in the waning years of the American dream, amid the heady bohemia of late-1970s Manhattan. Fosso arrived at his signature style, while a teenage refugee living in Bangui, the remote capital of the Central African Republic. How this 13-year-old survivor of the Nigerian-Biafran War, drawing from the tradition of African studio portraiture but working in near total isolation, anticipated developments at the cutting edge of contemporary Western art is a mystery in which the artist’s love of fashion plays no small part.
