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Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa | 
 enlarge | Author: Hans Silvester
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $29.70
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 55304
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 168
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 11.5 x 9.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0500543585
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.09635
EAN: 9780500543580
ASIN: 0500543585
Publication Date: April 28, 2008
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Product Description
An unprecedented series of images showing the Omo people's imaginative body decoration and embellishments.
The scene of tribal conflicts and guerrilla incursions, Ethiopia's Omo Valley is also home to fascinating rites and traditions that have survived for thousands of years. The nomadic peoples who inhabit this valley share a gift for body painting and elaborate adornments borrowed from nature, and Hans Silvester has captured the results in a series of photographs made over the course of numerous trips.
In this region of East Africa, the rivers that run through the dry savannas are home to abundant flowers, papyrus, and wild fruit trees, and this luxuriance becomes an invitation to creativity and spectacle. Within hand's reach, a multitude of plants inspire fanciful and ephemeral self-decoration, and the Omo react spontaneously: a leaf, root, seed pod, or flower is quickly transformed into an accessory. As in the West one might don a hat, people create caps from tufts of grass. As one would knot a tie or scarf, they ornament themselves with banana leaves or a stem laden with flowers. These decorations are embellished with butterfly wings, buffalo horns, boar's teeth, colorful feathers, and the like, and are further enhanced by body painting with pigments made from powdered stone, plants, berries, and river mud.
Here is a priceless record of a unique and increasingly fragile way of life, one threatened by conflict, climate change, and tourism. 160 color illustrations.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Natural Fashion: Tribal decorations from Africa by Hans Silvester August 29, 2008
This is an amazing book. I am a painter and it made me want to get in my studio and start paintings, the textures, the patterns and then now and then the sad contrast of weapons and Natures beauty, brings you right back to "real" world.I can't stop looking at the pictures, they draw you in. It is truly a beautiful people. The first time I saw it ,was at a friends house and I just had to go get it for myself. My friend offered to loan it to me, but that just wasn't enough. Thank you Hans Silvester for creating this book. Lone Hansen, Bainbridge Island , WA
The Best Book of African Photos August 18, 2008
I own most of the African Coffeetable Photos Books printed and this is by far the most beautiful Book I have ever seen!
Tribal Decoration July 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a visual artist I can tell you that when I first picked this book up in my local library, the fantastic and surprising images nearly took my breath away!! I took it over to another artist's house and we looked through it together. Deciding right then to get our own copies. The wild painting on the beautiful black skin is very similar to the free and easy strokes in my own paintings. I am considering getting the other African related book my the same author.
Breathtaking June 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book transcends fashion. The inventiveness of those pictured is breathtaking. I showed it to a friend and it made him cry! It's that powerful.
Beauty does not need a context June 13, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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. The sole review here trashing this beautiful book struck me as so unfair that I feel compelled to write a rebuttal.
The reviewer is concerned that this collection of photographs does not represent the daily lives and cultural practices of the people it represents. 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. All that may be true. 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. 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. 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. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.
Does photographing these people and the attention that ensues change them? Probably. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. But I do know it is up to the people being photographed to decide that. 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. In a globalizing world, I can think of many types of attention from the outside world that would not be quite so benign. 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. Change is inevitable. Hopefully this sort of attention will help ensure that the change is positive.
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